T his book's title says it all -- why has women's advancement been so slow? Why are women, 34 years after the passage of Title VII which prohibited gender discrimination in employment, still underpaid and underpromoted? Why do men still have such a strong hold on the best-paying jobs?

After all, numerous polls show that the vast majority of people in this country believe in equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work. Without question, a primary reason for sex discrimination in the workforce is the fact that corporations profit by paying women low wages. But is there more to the story? Do people harbor secret biases against women that they don't dare admit?

Virginia Valian, a psychology professor, pulls together numerous studies that show that, while people are not necessarily lying about their belief in women's equality, people view women and men through what Valian calls "gender schemas" which make us consistently underrate women and overrate men. In laboratory experiments, even women tend to underrate other women (including themselves), and even women tend to view leadership by women more negatively than leadership by men. Valian explains that even a slight bias in favor of men can, over time, mean a big difference in pay or promotion. A computer model of promotion showed that, if an organization started with an equal number of women and men, and then gave the men just a one percent advantage in promotion through eight grades, the highest level would end up being 65% men.

Valian believes that, because all of us hold unconscious biases against women in employment (and because some people hold conscious biases against women), affirmative action goals and timetables are one way to force us to overcome our biases and allow women a more level playing field. In fact, affirmative action can actually help rid the workplace of biases by increasing the pool of women employees. For example, one study examined supervisors' evaluations of women and men in 486 blue-collar and clerical work groups. When women were less than 20% of the employees, their performance evaluations were more negative than men's, but when women were more than 50% of the work group, their performance ratings were better than the men's. Valian suggests that when women are a small minority of a group their gender is highlighted, which causes them to be underrated.

Valian makes a strong case that because of the unconscious gender schemas we hold, we are not a "gender-blind" society and that abolishing affirmative action programs would do nothing but continue and strengthen the favoring of white men in employment. -- Jyotsna Sreenivasan