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Weaving Research Contributions of Women

of Color into

Psychology Curricula

Rihana S. Mason · Georgia State University

2026

Annual Convention

Western Psychological Association

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What is the DAC?

Mission Statement: The role of the Psi Chi Diversity Advisory Committee (DAC) shall be to ensure that the Society reflects the rich diversity of people and perspectives in psychology. Although the focus of diversity initiatives within Psi Chi may vary over time and circumstance, it is likely that the major initiatives of the DAC will address issues of race, culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and physical ability. The DAC shall oversee and assess all initiatives related to diversity.

Purpose Statement: Attend to diversity issues within Psi Chi, support diversity in the science and practice of psychology, and develop methods of assessing the degree to which Psi Chi is meeting its diversity goals. As one example of the Committee's tasks, the Board of Directors often calls upon the Diversity Committee to help with programming at the regional conventions.

Scan to access the DAC website

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DAC National Survey

To better understand the effects of legislative policy on educational settings, the Diversity Advisory Committee (DAC) is launched an initiative to explore how these evolving laws and policies are - or are not - affecting Psi Chi Chapters worldwide.

Scan the QR Code or

visit the link below

https://tinyurl.com/DACCARESURVEY2

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Advancing Herstory Agenda

A multi-layered approach to recognize, restore, and embed the scholarship of women of color into the fabric of psychological education.

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Recognizing the Scholarship of Women of Color

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Using Dissertations as a Storytelling Model

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Translating Scientific Herstories

01

Origin Story

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Origin Story: My Ancestry

My interest in psychology evolved over time grew as I experienced psychologists in action at various institutions— my story began without ever meeting a psychologist

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Origin Story: Studying How Individuals Form Mental Representations

Eye-tracking and cognitive processes research became the launchpad to study how people perceive, process, and construct meaning from the world around them.

My early research focused on how college students learn the meaning of novel words from reading texts. I continue to study how individual differences influence vocabulary acquisition and the best methods to determine depth of vocabulary knowledge.

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Recognizing the Scholarship of Women of Color in Psychology

It is not always the case that teachers share the same lived experiences as their students, so it is important that teaching materials contain a diverse set of lived experiences.

Many influential women are missing from lists of eminent psychologists including those who earned degrees early (Eagly & Miller, 2016).

It is important to create more opportunities to learn about the realities of psychology as a field and psychologists who have made an impact.

Given that psychology majors struggle with recognizing influential psychologists who are women or persons of color (Kelly et al., 2025), more efforts to uncover the legacies of women of color in psychology is needed.

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Origin Story: Academic Ancestry

When we enter graduate school, we are cared for by a different type of family our PhD advisors a group of graduate students committee members. A dissertation can be viewed either as the penultimate document of one’s academic journey or one of many documents in a series. One’s dissertation has the power to become the launch pad for a career trajectory or it can serve to just close the chapter on a long academic journey. Where the dissertation takes the author or someone else is dependent upon the connection one can make with the author or the content.

��

As a mentor of undergraduate and graduate students my dissertation served as an example that the journey to achieve a PhD was possible. Today it also serves as a reminder of the content areas that were and are still of interest to me as a research scientist. The opening pages also remind me of my committee members. Each one had a different emphasis and was trained with a particular school of thought. I had two psycholinguists and one school psychologist as committee members. I do not know if they overlapped in mentors or if their academic lineage leads back to a particular founding school of thought within psychology. Discovering one’s academic lineage is just as important as determining your biological ancestry. In some ways finding out who trained your mentors provides information about how you were mentored and what resources you have or had access to. It may uncover connections to other scholars who are conducting research on similar topics. I remember learning that the pool of researchers who used eye tracking to study reading was small

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Origin Story: Incomplete Academic Ancestries

These tools are incomplete. I noticed that my dissertation chair currently only has myself and one other connection when I personally know 3 other graduates of her lab. Two of them work in industry but the other recent graduate is a tenured faculty member. Just like biological ancestry academic genealogies are only as strong as the pool of persons that share their information. If we had better populated repositories, we could better track impact and reach. There are four Asian American women [Dji-Lih Bao (1933, Shepard), Sugi Mibai (1933, Pillsbury) Siao-Sung Djang (1935, Shepard), Bing Chung-Ling (1939, Colby)] who were studying at the University of Michigan in the 1930’s same era known as the Pillsbury period. All three were recipients of the Barbour Scholarship. This scholarship was awarded to “women holding citizenship in one of the Asian and/or Middle Eastern countries specifically named in Levi Barbour’s endowment donation” (cite, pg, year). Shepard was the first to earn a PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan in 1906.

�What is very interesting is that these women are not included in the academic genealogy for either Pillsbury or Shepard. Martha Guernsey Colby who received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1922 with a dissertation entitled A study of liminal sound intensities and the application of Weber's law to tones of different pitch does not currently have an academic tree. She serveds as part of the faculty until 1950.

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Recognizing the Scholarship of Women of Color in Psychology

Volume 1

Edited by Jon Grabe,

Michelle L. Ceynar, and

Rihana S. Mason

Two landmark volumes recover and celebrate early psychological research contributions by women of color —

scholars whose work shaped the discipline yet remained largely invisible in mainstream curricula.

Volume 2

Edited by Rihana S. Mason,

Michelle L. Ceynar, and

Jon Grahe

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Volume Highlights: Pioneers, Builders & Leaders

Tsuruko Arai Haraguchi

1912

First Japanese woman to earn a doctorate degree — her dissertation examined fatigue and she was a student of Edward Thorndike.

Diane J. Willis

1970

Past President of APA Division 12, 1^st Editor of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology-her dissertation examined the effects of socioeconomic status on perceptual and cognitive functioning

Mae Belle Pullins Claytor

1948

Professor of psychology at Morgan State College-her dissertation centered around the development of a questionnaire to measure aspects of parent-child relationships and their associations with delinquent behavior.

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Photo credit: undark.org

Photo credit: wikipedia

Photo credit: Oklahoma State University

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Centering the cognitive and perceptual work of women of color challenges us to ask: whose stimuli, cognitive processes, and responses have psychology's models been built upon?

Recognizing the Scholarship of Women of Color in Psychology: Dissertations

“we’re in a time now where everyone is excited about 23&Me and finding their own ancestry. I feel like this project is our own ancestry in scholarship.” Adding that, “they are able to find out what these women did in their scholarship and see how they’re connected in our discipline. It is like finding history. As a black woman being able to see myself in these dissertations and connections is wonderful.” This project is allowing students to see these women’s biographies as well, which might have been something they wouldn’t have necessarily seen previously. “The research that Dr. Inez Prosser investigated we see today with different personality measures and in early remnants of identity measures,” Mason added. “We’re providing a supplemental resource and additional materials about these pioneers. This publication promotes inclusivity within our textbooks and gives us a way to share these pioneers’ lives in undergraduate and graduate courses,” she added. Often, these women have been ignored in the past, but being able to elevate these voices through dissertations is helpful and needed.

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Using Dissertations as a Story-Telling Model

Each chapter follows a consistent, structure— designed to make historical scholarship both rigorous and teachable.

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Biographical Sketch

2

Dissertation Summary

3

Reproducibility Critique

4

Alternative Perspective

5

Classroom Teaching Example

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Using Dissertations as a Story-Telling Model

Going beyond Volume 1 and 2

1

Biographical Sketch

2

Dissertation Summary

3

Reproducibility Critique

4

Alternative Perspective

5

Classroom Teaching Example

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Using Dissertations as a Story-Telling Model

Ongoing Research

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2

3

Reproducibility Critique

4

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Who Becomes Notable?

Bibliometrics, approaches to measure and track publication data, drive current metrics of academic productivity.

The number of citations (Odic & Wojick, 2020) and higher h-index values (Geraci et al., 2015) favors male authors .

Gender and race are significant predictors of number of publications with men and white faculty as more productive (White et al., 2021)

Bibliometric indicators are both quantitative and qualitative, but quantitative indicators drive the qualitative indicators.

Tur-Porcar A, Mas-Tur A, Merigó JM, Roig-Tierno N, Watt J. A bibliometric history of the Journal of Psychology between 1936 and 2015. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied. 2018;152(4):199–225. pmid:29611782View Article

PubMed/NCBI

Google Scholar

Odic & Wojcik (2020) also shows that articles written by men are cited roughly 1.3 times more often than those by female authors. This tendency persists even when women publish in top-tier review journals. Female first-authored papers are also less likely to be included in graduate-level syllabi, The h-index was developed to provide a metric via a single number that captures productivity and impact based on the number of citations (Hirsch, 2005).The number of publications across women ranged from 1(dissertation only) to 499 with the number of citations ranging from 1 to 64,494. The unique number of co-authors ranged from 0 to 1637.

White, S. W., Xia, M., & Edwards, G. (2021). Race, gender, and scholarly impact: Disparities for women and faculty of color in clinical psychology. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 77(1), 78-89.

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Using Dissertations as a Story-Telling Model

CoAuthra (formerly Scholarnet)

1

2

3

Reproducibility Critique

4

5

Who Becomes Notable?

Earning a dissertation is a collaborative process that occurs within a support network

Bibliometric indicators beyond number of publications and citation counts, provide insights into the formal and informal networks of graduate students (Seckin & Varol, 2022).

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Using Dissertations as a Story-Telling Model

CoAuthra (formerly Scholarnet)

1

2

3

Reproducibility Critique

4

5

Who Becomes Notable?

Bibliometrics, approaches to measure and track publication data, drive current metrics of academic prestige.

Bibliometric indicators are both quantitative and qualitative, but quantitative indicators drive the qualitative indicators.

The number of citations favors male authors (Odic & Wojick, 2020)

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Translating Scientific Herstories

From Archive to Audience

The Advancing Herstory initiative moves beyond the printed volumes — using digital tools to make these recovered narratives accessible to students, educators, and the public.

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Translating Scientific Herstories

It is not always the case that teachers share the same lived experiences as their students, so it is important that teaching materials contain a diverse set of lived experiences.

STEM faculty often indicate that they need guidance and resources to incorporate culturally relevant content in their courses

Culturally relevant pedagogy emerged as an approach to assist faculty with meeting the demands of the diverse composition of students in their classroom.

To address the barrier of infusing culturally relevant pedagogy there needs to be curricular innovation

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Translating Scientific Herstories: Photo Stamps

Marigold Linton

1912

Keturah Whitehurst

1970

Martha Bernal

Creating uniform images for presentations- collaborative involvement of high school students

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Translating Scientific Herstories: Advancing Herstory App

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is an AI-assisted, intuition-driven approach to rapid app and website development — enabling researchers to build digital platforms without traditional programming expertise.

Why It Matters

The Advancing Herstory APP was built using this method, dramatically lowering the barrier between scholarship and public-facing digital storytelling.

This approach democratizes the translation of academic herstories into interactive, accessible experiences for educators and learners at every level.

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Making Scientific Herstories Accessible

A Living, Expandable Platform

The Advancing Herstory App brings the

scholarship of women of color into the

palms of students and educators —

combining biographical profiles, research

summaries, and teaching tools in one

place.

POWERED BY LOVEABLE AI

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Making Scientific Herstories Accessible

Creating a Vision for Psychology Curricula

Call to Action

Usability: What do faculty need and want to incorporate?

Building Block: Who else is missing?

Rihana S. Mason · Georgia State University. Rihana@gsu.edu