About Us

Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY); she is also co-director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project.  Dr Valian is a cognitive scientist whose research ranges from first and second language acquisition to gender differences and gender equity.


In her book, "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women" (MIT Press, 1998; paperback, 1999), Dr Valian asks why so few women are at the top of their profession, whether the profession be science, law, medicine, college teaching, industry, or business.  To provide an answer, Dr Valian integrates research from psychology, sociology, economics, and neuropsychology.  The data and theory from "Why So Slow?" are the starting point for the gender tutorials on this site.  Dr Valian is working with students, assistants, and interns to keep the material up-to-date and useful via the gender tutorials on this site.  Our intended audience is future and current scientists around the world - undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty.  Our aim is to make the tutorials as accurate, informative, and accessible as possible.  Students and educators in science are largely unaware of relevant research concerning the role of gender in science.  Our goal is to remedy that lack.  We want students, faculty, and administrators to know the data and to know the theory.   We want the tutorials to be useful, so please let us know how you think we can improve them.  If you have data or theory to provide, relevant references, suggestions of links that we should provide - let us know.  

A grant from the National Science Foundation to Virginia Valian supported the creation of these tutorials.