ITHACA, N.Y. -- Virginia V. Valian, professor of psychology and linguistics at Hunter College and author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (MIT Press, 1998), will give a lecture on women in academic careers Friday, April 1, at noon in the James Law Auditorium, College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University.

Valian, who also is the co-director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, will draw on psychology, sociology, economics and neuropsychology to examine the invisible barriers and explain the disparity in salary, rank and rates of promotion for men and women in the professions, science and academia. She will discuss why so few women hold positions of power and prestige, how men tend to accumulate advantage more easily than women and how gender schemas tend to underrate women and overrate men in professional arenas.

A cognitive scientist, Valian is a scholar whose research focuses on sex differences in cognition. Her work has been featured in The New York Times , Nature , Scientific American , The Women's Review of Books and many other journals and magazines.

While on campus, Valian will conduct workshops with deans, department chairs, women faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows throughout the day. For more information, contact Jill M. Short at jms31@cornell.edu or (607) 253-3472.

The lecture, hosted by the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Office of Human Resources, is free and open to the public.