BY CHRIS NASH
For NorthernLife.ca
What better time than the dark chill of late February to think about a Celebration? And what better to celebrate than a woman like Susan Pinker, this year's Celebrate Women speaker. She will be at the Fraser Auditorium in Sudbury on Wednesday, Mar. 5 at 7:30 pm to launch her book, "The Sexual Paradox".
Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist and journalist who writes about interpersonal and ethical issues in the workplace in her Problem Solving column in the Globe and Mail. She has worked as a clinical psychologist for twenty-five years and has taught at the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University. This fall she was nominated as one of three finalist for the YWCA/Bell 2007 Woman of Distinction Award in Communications.
Her book, "The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap" After four decades of eradicating gender barriers at work and in public life, why do men still dominate business, politics and the most highly paid jobs? Why do high-achieving women opt out of successful careers? Susan Pinker explores some answers to these questions in her groundbreaking first book. She takes a hard look at how fundamental sex differences continue to play out in the workplace.
By comparing the lives of fragile boys and promising girls, Pinker turns several assumptions upside down: that the sexes are biologically equivalent; that smarts are all it takes to succeed; that men and women have identical goals. If most children with problems are boys, then why do many of them as adults overcome early obstacles while rafts of competent, even gifted women choose jobs that pay less or decide to opt out at pivotal moments in their careers?
Weaving interviews with men and women into the most recent discoveries in psychology, neuroscience and economics, Pinker walks the reader through these minefields: Are men the more fragile sex? Which sex is the happiest at work? What does neuroscience tell us about ambition? Why do some male school drop-outs earn more than the bright, motivated girls who sat beside them in third grade? Pinker argues that men and women are not clones, and that gender discrimination is just one part of the persistent gender gap. This book though does not simply analyze the persistent problems nor is it only a myth buster. As would be expected by readers of her Problem Solving column in the Globe and Mail she suggests how to achieve better utilisation of the talents of women.
A work world that is satisfying to us all will recognize sex differences, not ignore them or insist that we all be the same.
This book will be published by Random House in Canada and by Scribnet in the US in March 2008. It will be published later in the spring in Holland, the UK, Israel, Brazil,Germany and Japan. It will be available exclusively at the Celebrate Women event.
Annually The Canadian Federation of University Women invites a remarkable author to Sudbury to Celebrate Women. This year's event is at the Fraser Auditorium at Laurentian University at 7:30 pm on Mar. 5.
Tickets at $10 are available from Helvi's Flowers, 124 Paris St., at Sklar Peppler Furniture, 1933 Regent St. (Southridge Plaza) and at De Angelis Physiotherapy, 432 Westmount.
For more information about the event or tickets, phone Cathy Morrison 523-2231 or Joan Cass 523-4663.
Dr. Chris Nash is founder of the Positive Parenting Institute.
