From Amazon's blurb: 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
http://www.amazon.com/Why-So-Slow-Advancement-Women/dp/0262720310
This was one of my first books about discrimination and implicit bias. It explained the roots of inequality and why we need laws against discrimination to counter automatic behaviors of exclusion and putting women in subordinate roles.
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