Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College – CUNY, and is a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. Within Psychology, she is a member of three training areas – Cognitive and Comparative Psychology, Developmental, and Basic and Applied Social Psychology. She also directs the Language Acquisition Research Center at Hunter College, which studies the acquisition of syntax in young children and the relation between bilingualism and cognition in adults. She examines children's early multi-word combinations and how they develop via corpus analysis and experiments.

In addition, Valian is co-founder and director of Hunter College’s Gender Equity Project. She examines the reasons behind women's slow advancement in the professions and proposes remedies for individuals and institutions. She has written on sexual harassment, recognition, and how to improve women's progress in the work world in general and academia in particular. Among other works, she is the author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (1998, MIT Press), and co-author (with Abigail Stewart) of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence (2018, MIT Press). She also contributed a chapter on gender and evaluation to the recently published book Extending justice: Strategies to increase inclusion and reduce bias, Carolina Academia Press (B. B. Donald & S. E. Redfield (ed.)) (2022). For her work on gender equity, Valian received the 2006 Betty Vetter Award for Research from WEPAN (Women in Engineering ProActive Network) and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.