Stuff I've Read: women in leadership

Posted by Laura Springer at 4.7.09

Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women
by Virginia Valian
421 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (February 5, 1999)

Virginia Valian: Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at CUNY Graduate School and Hunter College, specializing in "cognitive psychology, especially language acquisition"

Perspective: Raised to believe success would come with hard work and that true, valid arguments would win the day, Valian began to notice subtle, even negligible, differences in how lower status persons were treated in discussion. After reading a monograph by Geis, Carter, and Butler, she began to see how the accumulation of subtle discrimination slowed movement from lower to higher status in academe and beyond. Therefore, her book is for her as much as for her readers.
Organization of the Book: Following a preface by the author, laying out the biographical context for the work, and a Note on Method and Scope, are fourteen chapters. The Table of Contents shows no groupings.

Chapter 1 previews and overviews the subject of gender differences.
Chapters 2-3 cover biological and developmental issues.
Chapters 4-5 show the limits of hormonal explanations of sex differences.
Chapter 6 offers a cognitive explanation for gender schemas.
Chapter 7 shows gender schemas at work among adult men and women in their mutual misperceptions fo reality.
Chapter 8 shows how accumulated expectations shape our view of self.
Chapter 9 shows how they shape our interpretations of success and failure.
Chapter 10 shows how gender schemas dlow down earnings and/or advancement for women in the professions and Chapter 11 shows the same for women in academia.
Chapter 12 considers the issue of whether inequality is inequity and concludes that it is not inequity and that "attaining a happy medium...requires changing gender schemas" (276).
Chapter 13 reviews legal remedies, citing and describing various cases, and Chapter 14 suggests remedies "to nullify the negative professional consequences of gender schemas and to equalize men's and women's ability to accumulae advantage" (303).

to clarify the subtleties of gender schemas
to increase awareness of gender schema
to instill sufficient outrage while not taking it personally
to lay out the merits of the case
to "make the invisible...that fair and accurate evaluations of men and women will become possible" (i)
to include data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology

Tag: books

Posted by Laura Springer at 4.7.09

Mary Field Belenky: consultant on human development; associate research professor at the University of Virginia
Blythe McVicker Clinchy: professor of psychology at Wellesley College
Nancy Rule Goldberger: psychology faculty at The Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara
Jill Mattuck Tarule: professor and dean of the college of education and social services at the University of Virginia

Perspective: All four authors come from the perspective of student development. All four decided to embody egalitarianism in the research and writing process and to learn from and trust the voices of the women they interviewed.
Organization of the Book: After a new preface (reflecting back on the process of research, writing, and dissemination after ten years) and the original preface (laying out in short, the intention and methods), Women's Ways of Knowing moves to an introduction (detailing the mentods and intellectual setting of the study). The bulk of the work is divided into two parts.

Part one uses William Perry's epistemological categories as a framework to understand the interviewee's perspectives on knowing.
Part two runs the categorized perspectives through the contexts of family and academy.

to "describe the ways of knowing that women have cultivated and learned to value"
to "describe the multitude of obstacles women must overcome in developing the power of their minds"
to "desribe five different perspectives from which women view reality and draw conclusions about truth, knowledge, and authority"

Tag: books

Posted by Laura Springer at 4.7.09

Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders
by Alice H. Eagly (Author), Linda L. Carli (Author)
336 pages
Harvard Business School Press; illustrated edition edition (October 16, 2007)

Alice H. Eagley: professor and department chair of psychology and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University
Linda L. Carli: associate professor in psychology at Wellesley; her research focuses on gender, influence, and leadership

Perspective: The book comes from a need to explain why, though the glass ceiling has been shattered, so few women are in positions of leadership.
Organization of the Book: Following the preface and acknowledgements, the book is divided is divided into eleven chapters. Groupings are not given, though there appears to be a movement from general to specific and from present situation to future possibility.

Chapters 1-2 lay the groundwork, unpacking the idea of the glass ceiling and summarizing women's progress.
Chapters 3-7 discuss and critique forces considered responsible for the presence of women and predominance of men in leadership.
Chapters 8-10 discuss how women negotiate the labyrinth.
Chapter 11 wraps up the book and looks to the future.

to ask why women have been excluded
to uncover the skills needed to negotiate the labyrinth
to help readers understand leadership by men and women and the possibility of gender equality

Tag: books

Stuff I've Read