Functionalism, Darwinism, and the psychology of women forty years on

X. Functionalism,
Darwinism, and
intersectionality:
Using an intersectional
perspective to reveal the
appropriation of science
to support the status quo

F eminism
&
Psychology

Feminism & Psychology

2016, Vol. 26(3) 353365
! The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0959353516655371
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Stephanie A Shields
The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Abstract
Why should anyone care about long-dead 19th-century scientists thoughts about the
differences between women and men? And what does such a paper have to say to our
contemporary concerns? I believe that knowledge of this history is invaluable to the
health and progress of feminist psychology. This history, when viewed through an intersectional lens, can give us insight into the complex way in which values can constrict
research questions and methods, can narrow and oversimplify what counts as data,
and can be used as a regressive instrument to shore up the sociocultural status quo.
In this paper I first briefly review the context in which Functionalism, Darwinism, and
the Psychology of Women (hereinafter Functionalism/Darwinism) was written. Then I
examine what the addition of an intersectionality perspective to that work adds to our
understanding of the history of the psychology of women and gender. I focus on the
intersection of gender and race (and briefly touch on social class) because these were
critical to 19th-century scientific justifications for existing status and power relations.
Keywords
history of psychology, intersectionality, evolutionary theory, colonialism, sex differences

Corresponding author:
Stephanie A Shields, The Pennsylvania State University, 140 Moore Bldg, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Email: sashields@psu.edu

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Origin stories1
I believe Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women: A Study in
Social Myth (Shields, 1975; hereinafter Functionalism/Darwinism) is the rst
published paper to consider the history of the psychology of women in other
than a Freudian or psychoanalytic context. In the article I focused on late 19th
century evolutionary theory and functionalist psychologys treatment of womens
psychology and the psychology of sex dierences. The articles focus is entirely on
what men of science thought about white women and how the rst generation of
American women psychologists (e.g., Hollingworth, 1916; Thompson, 1903;
Woolley, 1910) responded to some of these thoughts. Functionalism/Darwinism
examined three topics that were signicant to the psychology of women from the
late 19th to early 20th century psychology in the US and Europe (particularly
Britain): dierences in the size and structure of the brain and their implications
for personality and intelligence; the hypothesis of greater male variability and its
relation to social and educational issues, including the education of women; and
maternal instinct and assumptions about female nature. The paper concludes
with a discussion of how the functionalist perspective on women was eclipsed by
psychoanalytic theory and subsequent thinking on brain dierences, variability,
and maternal instinct. One of the major conclusions of the paper is that scientists
of that era were oblivious to the ways in which their personal circumstances and
cultural privilege shaped their scientic practice, their conclusions regarding female
personality and ability, and their use of awed data to justify existing social
structures.
Functionalism/Darwinism began as a term paper in my rst year of graduate
school. I was in a history of psychology course and needed a term paper topic.
My roommate observed that I talked a lot about the new psychology of women
(new, at any rate, in 19711972). This new psychology of women was a response
to the Freudian conceptualization of womens psyche as passive, masochistic, and
narcissistic which was the prevailing psychological take on womens psychology.
She asked me whether there had been a psychology of women before Freud; I said
I didnt know, but that would be a good term paper topic. Little did I know where
that decision would lead me. I did not have the benet of knowing about Naomi
Weissteins germinal Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientic Law: Psychology
Constructs the Female (Weisstein, 1968) or other publications (e.g., Garskof,
1971) that threw open disciplinary windows for some much-needed air. This was,
of course, long before the Internet, and research depended on treks to the library to
pour through volume after dusty volume. With the help of Penn State Inter-Library
Loan and uncounted hours in the library stacks, I pieced together my own introductory course on womens history. It was a transformative experience to discover
history that had been so deeply buried. For weeks I drove my roommate and
friends crazy with you wouldnt believe what I just found!!, making them
listen to illogical, misogynistic, and sometimes bizarre observations by Great
Men of Science. The result was a 70 page term paper there was simply so
much to include that began with the Bible and early Christian philosophers

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and ended with the rst generation of women psychologists in the US. It was the
foundation for the American Psychologist article that focused on mid- to late-19th
century European and American psychologys representation of the psychology of
women.
Reading my 1975 publication today I see that my facts are correct, the conclusions are thoughtful and logical, and the story is solid. I also see what is missing
from the account. I told the story as a story only of gender, a story in which the
supplementary, subordinate role of the female was taken to show the evolutionary supremacy of the Caucasian male (Shields, 1975, p. 739). When I look back to
my 1975 paper and other work that owed directly from it (e.g., Shields, 1982), I see
that my critique of 19th century nature-based explanations of gender dierence was
constrained by the fact that I was looking largely at a single intersection, that of
privileged white male scientists and the women in the white privileged world that
these men inhabited. I acknowledged both a racial and class dimension to 19thcentury scientic beliefs about women, but stopped short of exploring their deeper
connection to the context and content of scientic views on womens nature. In fact,
I told friends that someone ought to write a paper on the history of race psychology
as I had on women because in the course of my research I had found so many
descriptions of race dierences that seemed to parallel the descriptions of gender
dierences. At some level I must have sensed a connection between the two, but I
continued to think of them as independent categories. I think in large part this was
because the scientic literature on gender (at that time likely to be labeled sex differences) was concerned with discriminating between white women and men (e.g.,
Bardwick, 1971, and work cited in Tavris & Or, 1977), whereas the literature on
race was concerned with discriminating between white and nonwhite men (see work
cited in Guthrie, 1976, and Gould, 1981). The absence of sustained explicit discussion of women of color made it easy to see only categories that were of concern to
19th-century scientists. What mattered to them was the status of white men relative
to other white people (especially privileged white women) and relative to other men
(especially men of other races).
At the time I believed that a dierent story needed to be told about race; I did
not understand that race and gender were essentially part of the same story. In
other words, I understood gender and race (and social class) as related constructs,
but only years later realized they are relational constructs (Shields, 2007). I understood that scientic accounts of both gender and race categories had much in
common, at least in that gender and race were each used to prop up the status
quo, and each was used to sustain the belief that the way social relations were
organized at that moment was both natural and inevitable. Race, class, gender, and
culture were part of the just-so story of why white, northern European males of the
privileged classes were at the top of the evolutionary heap in terms of cognitive and
moral capacity and cultural superiority. What I could at the time see was that
popular culture views on gender and race fed scientic views and vice versa
(Shields, 2013). What I did not see at the time was how absolutely necessary the
story of race was to the just-so story of gender, or how necessary the story of
gender was to the just-so story of race.

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I was not alone in thinking in non-intersectional terms. For example, Robert

Guthries important book, Even the Rat Was White (1976), outlined the way in
which race was dealt with in studies of intelligence and the eugenics movement
from the 19th through the mid-20th-century. He detailed the racism inherent in
scientic practice, but his account reected no awareness that beliefs about gender
intersect with and support racism or that the experience of scientic racism can
dier for women and men. Stephen Jay Goulds inuential The Mismeasure of Man
(1981) also addressed measurement of human capacities and intelligence, focusing
on the way race was used to assert and justify European white mens intellectual
and cultural superiority. In these and other late 20th century scientic exposes of
racism, sexism, and colonialism, categories were considered side by side (if, in fact,
more than one dimension was considered), rather than as interlocking systems of
oppression. For example, when considering comparative brain size and intelligence,
Gould (1981, p. 103) described Paul Brocas 1860s comparisons of the brains of
women and men, suggesting that Brocas massive collection of data on women was
not propelled by misogyny but rather because
inferior groups are interchangeable in the general theory of biological determinism.
They are continually juxtaposed, and one is made to serve as a surrogate for all for
the general proposition holds that society follows nature, and that social rank reects
innate worth.

Gould was correct as far as he goes. Yes, these groups were interchangeable, in that
comparisons between any of these groups on any physical or intellectual dimension
rearm the superiority of white men. What did not occur to any of us writing on
the topic at the time, however, is that maintenance of the white mans position also
depended on how the purported weaknesses/inferiorities of each subordinate group
were regarded in relation to one another.

Functionalism, Darwinism, and intersectionality

Since embracing an intersectional perspective in my own scholarship,
I have wanted the opportunity to recast Functionalism/Darwinism in intersectional
terms to better reveal hidden mechanics of power and inequality. As Vivian
May (2015, p. 75) has observed, intersectionality is invaluable for plumbing
historys silences; for understanding oppression as having a history and as
existing within a set of cultural, political, and social conditions; and for unearthing
a vision of historical agency for those whose personhood and agency have been
denied.
Over the past 20 years intersectionality has become a central tenet of feminist
thinking, and its inuence is increasingly being felt across numerous disciplines,
including even psychology. (See, for example, the special issue of Sex Roles on
intersectionality, Shields, 2008.) Originating in black feminist/womanist theory in
the late 19th-century and critical race theory in the 20th, intersectionality theory, at
its simplest, asserts that one aspect of social identity, for example, gender, is

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inextricably linked with other aspects of social identity, such as racial ethnicity
and social class, both as experienced by the individual and as operative at the
socio-structural level (Warner, Settles, & Shields, in press). Thus, we cannot understand the individuals experience of one dimension of social identity without reference to other dimensions of social identity. If we study women, we must specify
which women because other relevant aspects of social identity, whether social class,
age, race, and/or other, shape experience of gender dierently for dierent intersectional positions.
I had the opportunity to begin reframing 19th-century history in intersectional
terms in an article for a special issue of American Psychologist on the occasion of
Charles Darwins 200th birthday; it was co-authored with Sunil Bhatia.2 Sunil and
I (Shields & Bhatia, 2009) pointed out how appropriation of Darwins theory,
particularly by Herbert Spencer (1902), revealed ways in which scientic representations of race, gender, and culture individually and together validated existing
social hierarchy and scientists views of the natural relation between advanced
societies and those identied as primitive.3 I build on that paper in the following
sections.

Inferiority and complementarity

It is useful to start with the role played by white women and men of other races and
classes in the project of accounting for a hierarchy of human characteristics that
put white men at the top of the pyramid. The puzzle that evolutionary biologists
and early psychologists had to resolve was to explain the lack of cultural advancement in primitive men who were nevertheless men, and explain the intellectual,
emotional, and moral inferiority of white women who were nevertheless culturally
advanced.4
Explaining white womens limitations was a bit tricky. The account had to
explain obvious feminine traits (emotionality; intuition; care and concern for
the minutiae of everyday life), yet demonstrate womens worth as partners to
white men; at the same time, it had to explain how womens intellectual and emotional limitations were not passed on to their sons. One key to the puzzle is the
assumption (made by Darwin and many others) that greater sexual dierentiation
comes with civilizations advancement. That is, as culture becomes more complex
and rened, clearer dierences between the sexes occur in appearance, hardiness,
character, emotional control, and mental traits (e.g., intelligence; objectivity; creative thought). This worked for both Darwin, who espoused the notion of the
general inferiority of females, as well as for those who proposed that the traits
of each sex were complementary. I have often cited the noted physiologist
Carpenter (1894, p. 417) for providing the perfect example of how complementarity
was construed, especially how attributes of each sex map onto the masculine-public
versus feminine-domestic domains:
There is nowhere, perhaps, a more beautiful instance of complementary adjustment
between the Male and Female character, than that which consists in the predominance

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of the Intellect and Will, which is required to make a man successful in the battle of
life, and of the lively Sensibility, the quick Sympathy, the unselsh Kindliness, which
give to woman the power of making the happiness of the home, and of promoting the
purest pleasures of social existence.

With respect to feminine characteristics, some, like Darwin and others, reasoned as
Aristotle had: females mature earlier than males and therefore their mental and
moral growth is stunted compared to males, either due to purported smaller brain
size or failure of signicant brain regions to develop as fully as in males. For
example, the eminent evolutionary biologist George Romanes (1887, p. 655)
observed that womens smaller brain was responsible for their mental inferiority
which displays itself most conspicuously in a comparative absence of originality,
and this more especially in the higher levels of intellectual work. Cerebral inferiority was, nevertheless, seen as having some advantage. For example, womens
perceptual and intuitive superiority came about because other advanced cognitive
capacities were limited. As one early psychologist concluded:
Some women possess [intuition] in very high degree; young children, whose command
of language is very slight, may exhibit it; and even in the higher animals, especially the
dog, it is not altogether lacking. (McDougall, 1923, p. 391)

Intellectual achievement was further hampered by female reproductive physiology,

which was believed to divert blood from the brain to the uterus. G Stanley Hall
(1906), a founder of developmental psychology, was one of many who put this view
forward.
As if brain size and reproductive physiology were not enough to limit females,
evolutionary biologists and psychologists hypothesized that females were likelier to
hover at the average on biological and psychological traits than were males. Of
most relevance here, the variability hypothesis proposed that females were less
likely to vary in intelligence than males, and thus unlikely to express genius
(Shields, 1982). While ostensibly about females of all races, the discussion and
evidence in support of the variability hypothesis centered on explaining why
white women were naturally limited in whatever aspirations they may have had
outside of mothering. A good deal of twisted logic was used to explain why white
women were not and never could be competitive with men in any sphere of intellectual competence. As Darwin famously observed, it is fortunate for females that
most inherited characteristics are transmitted equally to ospring of both sexes as
otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental
endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen
(Darwin, 1882, p. 565).5
With respect to race, the rationale for dierence in competence was simpler than
the explanation of gender dierence among northern Europeans. One reason for
this could be that people (specically men) of other races posed less of a threat to
the status quo than white women who were of the same social class as the scientists

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holding forth. The explanation for race dierences typically boiled down to white
mens purportedly greater cranial capacity/brain size. The dierence was asserted
to have its origin in evolution rather than in development and reproductive physiology as was proposed for females.
The most widely held scientic belief in the mid- to late 19th-century was that
proto-human groups (that is, species that preceded homo sapiens) dispersed prior to
the complete evolution of the human mind and development of language. Thus,
dierences between northern European, and especially Africans and Australian
aboriginals, were attributed to dierences in ancestry. A minority of scientists
asserted that all races descended from a common human progenitor and that
racial dispersal occurred after brain evolution and the development of language
had occurred. (Most evidence points to Darwin taking this position; see Alter,
2007.) Regardless of their beliefs about human origins, however, all scientists
pointed to dierences in brain size and complexity as the proximate cause of differences between northern Europeans and other races (Gould, 1981). And both
camps agreed that civilized European races ultimately would replace less-civilized
races because Europeans superior intellect would make them successful in any
intergroup competition: men of European races were destined to prevail and
men of other races were destined to yield. The notion blatantly justies colonialism,
but was regarded as scientically rather than politically reasoned. (See also Bhatia,
2002; Shields & Bhatia, 2009.)
Usually the capacities of white women and men of other races were directly
compared to those of white men, but not to each other. When they were considered
at the same time, the narrative appears to privilege male competence. Darwin, for
example, proposed that:
Woman seems to dier from man in mental disposition, chiey in her greater tenderness and less selshness; and this holds good even with savages . . . with woman
the powers of intuition, of rapid perception and perhaps of imitation, are more
strongly marked than man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of
the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization. (Darwin, 1882,
pp. 563564)

Thus, all women and men lower than white men in the gender/race hierarchy have
feminine intellectual and emotional attributes, but women of all races have these
characteristics to a greater extent than men of their race. The reason for this was
traced to purported brain mass. A colleague of Brocas, for example, observed that
Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women
(Herve quoted in Gould, 1981, p. 103).

The invisible woman

The missing persons in this account of race and gender hierarchy are women of
races identied as primitive by 19th-century scientic men. Assertions of greater

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similarity between the sexes in non-Northern European races rendered these

women apparently irrelevant and therefore invisible in discussions of women
(where the focus was on comparing white women and white men) and to men
of their own race (where the focus was on comparing primitive men to white
men). So-called primitive women, however, were critically important to explaining the superiority of white men.
In the case of 19th-century evolutionary biology and psychology, men of nonWestern cultures and white women were the exceptions (to white men) that
required explanation, whereas women of non-Western cultures were rarely mentioned. Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) proposed the term intersectional
invisibility to describe the idea that two or more intersecting subordinate identities
render a person invisible to others relative to individuals with a single subordinate identity. (Intersectional invisibility aims to explain the representation of certain
groups, not their own experience of that intersectional position.) As a non-prototypical member of either group, intersectionally invisible groups are overlooked
or excluded when groups are studied. Both in 19th-century science and today,
almost without exception race equals male and gender equals white. Race and
gender are rarely discussed together except in scholarly articles that explicitly
employ an intersectional framework. In fact, intersectional invisibility can be
thought of as giving rise to intersectionality theory, both in its contemporary
form (Crenshaw, 1994/2005) and its antecedents in 19th-century black feminist
thought (May, 2015).
On the rare occasions when primitive women were mentioned, they were
imagined in terms of their physical coarseness and unfeminine appearance or
in terms of reproduction. Although Darwin did not dwell on this, other evolutionary scientists pointed to physical similarities of women and men in these cultures,
with the purported similarity due to womens less feminine appearance. Thus
primitive men were viewed as intellectually inferior to white men, but still
masculine.
Gender dierentiation was portrayed as a privilege of evolutionary success in
humans, the outcome of successful intergroup conict. That is, the victors in intergroup conict showed more dierences between the sexes than those conquered.
And this exaggerated dierence was not seen as solely a product of culture, but a
material, embodied dierence in physical appearance, brain, and temperament.
Often this included a comparison of the brain, skull, and facial characteristics of
these humans with apes, with the author going to great lengths to describe the
morphology of the primitive individual as more similar to nonhuman primates
than other humans (Gould, 1981). For example, philosopher Alexander
Sutherland observed that although the savage of Negrito, Bushman, or
Adaman type has a brain, much above that of the highest apes, [it] is by no
means the wondrous organ it is subsequently to become in advanced races, and
this coarseness is already evident in infants: babes of these races are not nearly so
tender or so delicate to nurture as those of civilised man and they come unhurt
through an ordeal that would be certain death to the infant of a civilised race
(Sutherland, 1898, p. 97).

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Women of all races were seen as sharing attributes stemming from their relation
to men. For example, along with limited intellect, lower-level emotion skills were
thought to be relatively more developed in women of all races. These emotional
skills, such as they were, were the result of womens comparative physical weakness
and lack of rational capacity relative to men.
In barbarous times a woman who could from a movement, tone of voice, or expression of face, instantly detect in her savage husband the passion that was rising, would
be likely to escape dangers run into by a woman less skilled in interpreting the natural
language of feeling. Hence, from the perpetual exercise of this power, and the survival
of those having most of it, we may infer its establishment as a feminine faculty.
(Spencer, 1902, p. 343)

This feminine faculty, as important for survival as it might be, was clearly
identied as a lesser gift, in that there is little to show for this skill: Ordinarily,
this feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state of mind
through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed without assignable
reasons (p. 343). As I observed in a previous paper, we can conclude two
things from Spencers assessment: First, it is clear that female [emotional skills
serve] the purpose of compensating for weakness and [are] not applicable to achieving other ends. Second, women really do not understand what they are doing
anyway (Shields, 2007, p. 102).
Primitive women and men were described as physically similar and the gender divide was maintained by evoking role-specic instincts that just happened to reect the
distinctions drawn between public and domestic spheres in European society. Thus,
the limits of male primitives were clear: they lacked the intellectual capacity to be the
equal of more advanced European males, and they were like females except for their
aggressive instincts. Nevertheless, primitive men were superior to primitive women
by virtue of their relatively greater intellectual capacity.
Primitive men, though credited as aggressive in the work of survival, were depicted
as ineective in harnessing that aggression to advance their culture toward a more
civilized state. By being described as indistinguishable from females except for
aggressive instincts, primitive men were unmanned relative to their white counterparts, even as their humanity and heterosexuality were unchallenged. Primitive men
were portrayed as no match for men from advanced cultures because they could not
marshal their aggressive impulses eectively and constructively.
The hypothesized increase in sexual dimorphism with cultural advance thus
serves to maintain a racial hierarchy. At the same time it contains the women of
so-called advanced cultures/race, by making privileged womens capacity for challenging male dominance unthinkable. Although privileged as members of advanced
racial culture, white women were represented as lacking in the very abilities that
could make them successful outside of the domestic arena. The invisible women of
other races, though essential to the logical structure of a racial and gender order,
were themselves of no direct concern to scientists because they were neither a threat
to manliness nor to racial hierarchy.

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Conclusion
The hypothesized increase in sexual dimorphism with cultural advance is a hypothesis that both reies racial hierarchy and constrains women by virtue of intellectual
and emotional limitations. Thus, a look at history through the lens of intersectionality yields a much more complete, integrated, and persuasive picture of the circulation of culturally driven stereotypes in science.
In Functionalism/Darwinism I viewed the representation of upper-class white
women as a simple justication for the status quo at home. The history becomes
more complex, richer, and I believe more accurate when viewed through an intersectional lens. By unpacking how white privileged men of science viewed men and
women of other races, we can better understand how views of white women as
fragile and divergent from white men in personality and ability serve not only to
maintain a white sexual hierarchy, but also feed the story of racial hierarchy.
Furthermore, the purported similarity of women and men of primitive cultures/races not only veries the belief in general backwardness of those races,
but also underscores the signicance of sex/gender dierence that was believed to
be magnied as one ascends the racial hierarchy. Taken together, these justications reveal the intimate connection among scientic story-telling, sexism, racism,
and the colonial project.
Authors note
It is an honor and a pleasure to have Feminism & Psychology appraise Functionalism,
Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women (Shields, 1975) on its 40th birthday.

Acknowledgement
I am deeply grateful to special issue editors Hale Bolak Boratav, Helen Clegg, and Lisa
Lazard for this opportunity to explore the value of an intersectional perspective in understanding and applying lessons from the history of the psychology of women and gender. I
would like to thank Heather MacArthur, Kaitlin McCormick, Elaine Dicicco, and Lizbeth
Kim for their comments on an earlier draft.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Notes
1. I have found few references or no reference to other intersectional positions, such as
sexuality, (dis)ability, and other social identity markers of difference in justifications for
social or cultural hierarchies in the evolutionary science of that era.
2. I had been invited by the issue editor to write on Darwin and emotional expression
(human emotion is my primary line of research). Looking over proposed contributions,

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I noticed three things: I was the only female first author (and there was only one female
co-author), there were no women or men of color as authors, and there was no proposed
contribution related to the connection between Darwins theory and work and its social
implications (beyond evolutionary psychology). The issue editor was not defensive when I
pointed this out, and he was quite positive about my request to write on Darwin and
gender, race and culture, enthusiastically accepting my suggestion for a substitute author
on emotion. But he did not seem to grasp why these omissions were problematic, and he
did not go beyond my specific suggestions for addressing them.
3. While I was working on Functionalism/Darwinism I found many instances of racial
comparison, mainly comparisons between white Europeans and indigenous peoples of
Africa and Australia, viewed as primitives by Northern European scientists. Without
doubt, the term primitive is hugely problematic, but I use it in the present paper because it
was the language that was used in the 19th and early 20th-century to describe African,
Indian, and aboriginal Australian peoples who were collectively seen as underdeveloped
and unsophisticated compared to advanced Northern European peoples. The language
also underscores the then-prevailing belief that these differences were grounded in
fundamental biological differences (nature) and relatively impervious to contextual or
environmental influence (nurture).
4. See Richardson (2013) and Bluhm, Jacobson, and Maibom (2012) for discussions of
contemporary sexing of the brain and body.
5. Darwin believed that male superiority was secured by a tendency of some characteristics
acquired in adulthood to be transmitted only to offspring of the same sex (an idea he first
espoused in attempting to explain the males often spectacular secondary sex characteristics in many nonhuman animal species). Thus, he asserted, the qualities that adult men
acquire in their more rigorous struggle for life are more likely to be passed on to their
male than their female offspring. This distinctly Lamarckian perspective helped him
explain why sons grew up to be judges, bankers, and soldiers, while daughters did not,
despite inheriting characteristics from their fathers as well as their mothers.

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Author Biography
Stephanie A Shields is Professor of Psychology and Womens Studies at Penn State
University. Her research is at the intersection of emotion, gender, and feminist
psychology, focusing on the use of emotion representation to assert or challenge
status and power. Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of

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Emotion (2002) received the Association for Women in Psychologys Distinguished

Publication Award, as did a special issue of Sex Roles on intersectionality (2008)
which she edited. Her experiential learning tool, WAGES (wages.la.psu.edu), illustrates the cumulative eect of apparently minor biases in the academic workplace.
She is a recipient of the Society for the Psychology of Womens Carolyn W. Sherif
Award which recognizes contributions to the eld of the psychology of women as a
scholar, teacher, mentor, and leader.

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