How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand. Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world―in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority. Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.

Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige? Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women. According to Valian, men and women alike have implicit hypotheses about gender differences―gender schemas―that create small sex differences in characteristics, behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations of men and women. Those small imbalances accumulate to advantage men and disadvantage women. The most important consequence of gender schemas for professional life is that men tend to be overrated and women underrated. Valian's goal is to make the invisible factors that retard women's progress visible, so that fair treatment of men and women will be possible. The book makes its case with experimental and observational data from laboratory and field studies of children and adults, and with statistical documentation on men and women in the professions. The many anecdotal examples throughout provide a lively counterpoint.

Sekerina, I. A., Spradlin, L., & Valian, V. V. (Eds.) (2019).  Bilingualism, executive function, and beyond:  Questions and insights. SiBiL Series. Amsterdam:  John Benjamins.

The study of bilingualism has charted a dramatically new, important, and exciting course in the 21st century, benefiting from the integration in cognitive science of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology (especially work on the higher-level cognitive processes often called executive function or executive control). Current research, as exemplified in this book, advances the study of the effects of bilingualism on executive function by identifying many different ways of being bilingual, exploring the multiple facets of executive function, and developing and analyzing tasks that measure executive function. The papers in this volume (21 chapters), by leading researchers in bilingualism and cognition, investigate the mechanisms underlying the effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They take us beyond the standard, classical, black-and-white approach to the interplay between bilingualism and cognition by presenting new methods, new findings, and new interpretations.

Rabinowitz, V., Nicols-Grinenko, A. & Valian, V. (forthcoming). Developing successful faculty: A handbook of workshops. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Being a successful faculty member is largely a matter of developing diverse skills and putting them to practice.  That is the first premise of the book.  The second premise is that colleges and universities already have among their faculty and staff individuals who have the knowledge and ability to help their colleagues develop those skills.  The third premise is that workshops are an ideal setting for learning.  Workshop members learn from each other as well as from the presenters. In this book, with an approximate length of 250 pages, we outline workshops designed to help faculty succeed.