SLD Symposia - response to V. Valian's post

[Anna Papafragou]

Dear Virginia (and members of the list),

The organizers of the SLD Symposia are very committed to gender equity in our field. Over the past several years, the symposia have included a truly balanced mix of male and female speakers (14 women and 15 men, according to the list below) and for next year we have settled on a topic that involves an all-female line-up of speakers. With only three speakers per group, sometimes we get a single-gender group (as was the case this year) but overall this does not skew the gender distribution:

2004: Heidi Feldman, Pat Kuhl, Laura-Ann Petitto (inaugural symposium)
2005:  Marc Hauser, Timothy Gentner, Michael Tomasello
2006: Cynthia Fisher, Dedre Gentner, Adele Goldberg
2007: Janet Pierrehumbert, Josh Tenenbaum, Steve Pinker
2008: Susan Carey, Susan Gelman, Linda Smith
2009: Laura Schulz, Gergely Csibra, Renee Baillargeon
2010: Noam Chomsky, Randy Gallistel
2011: Rebecca Treiman, Charles Perfetti, Mark Seidenberg
2012: Rebecca Saxe, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Ani Patel
2013: John Trueswell, Luca Bonatti, Michael Frank

The Society recognizes the importance of balanced gender representation beyond the make-up of the Symposia. As many members of Info-Childes know, the past and present Editors of the SLD journal ('Language Learning and Development') have been women (Susan Goldin-Meadow; Cynthia Fisher), as is the SLD President (Lila Gleitman), several members of the editorial and advisory boards, and the current Chair of the SLD Symposium committee (myself).

So we very much agree with the idea that we should not just be aiming for but achieving gender equity in our field - in fact, we believe that, in organizing our annual Symposia, we have come very close to doing just that. We will continue our efforts to invite outstanding scientists (both women and men) to participate in the Society's activities.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone in the SLD Symposium in October!

Best,
Anna

-------------------------
Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Education
Department of Psychology
University of Delaware
http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu

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