Susan Pinker

Career

Pinker spent 25 years in clinical practice and teaching psychology, first at Dawson College, then at McGill University.

Pinker writes about new findings in behavioral science in the Mind and Matter column, which appears Saturdays in the Wall Street Journal. Her Globe and Mail columns, Problem Solving and the Business Brain, applied the latest evidence from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral economics and social psychology to the world of business. They appeared weekly in The Globe and Mail from 2003 to 2011.

Pinker's book, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap, is focused on how sex differences play out in the workplace. By comparing fragile boys who later succeed, with high achieving women who opt out, Pinker turns several assumptions upside down: that the sexes are biologically equivalent, that smarts are all it takes to succeed and that men and women have identical interests and goals. After decades of women's educational coups and rising through the ranks, men still outnumber women in business, physical science, law, engineering, and politics. In explaining this ratio, Pinker's stance is that discrimination plays just a small part. If the majority of children with school and behavioral problems are boys, then why do so many overcome early obstacles, while rafts of high achieving women choose jobs that pay less or opt out at pivotal moments in their careers?

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier and Smarter, combines narrative nonfiction with science reporting to explore how our social bonds, face-to-face contact, and networks affect our thinking, learning, happiness, resilience and longevity. It was published by Random House in Canada, Spiegel and Grau in the United States, Atlantic Books in the United Kingdom, Charactery in Poland, Book21 in Korea, Cheers Media in China, and Batik Yayincilik in Turkey. It was selected as an Apple Nonfiction "Best Pick" in 2014.