2015 Association for Women in Psychology Conference

Many of us have been trained as change agents in psychology. Women of Color of diverse Asian ethnicities raised at the intersections of gender and ethnic socialization have challenged dominant discourses of the quiet, subservient Asian female worker bee (Okubo, 2013). This panel of women of Japanese, Korean and Filipina descent, trained as counseling psychologists early and mid-career academics but working in non-counseling graduate programs as faculty members and in senior administration will facilitate a discussion on issues related to race, gender, power and privilege and strategies to leverage privileges we have to disrupt oppressive practices in the academia. Counseling Psychologists have unique training that allow us to be aware of power, privilege, and oppression at individual, cultural, institutional, and societal levels, and we are equipped to facilitating dialogues and concerted effort to instigating positive, meaningful changes. By critically examining our positionalities and missed opportunities from the past, we would like to engage with the discussion attendees to generate action plans as social change agents. We would like to facilitate the structured discussion using the following questions: How can we leverage our positionalities to be more effective allies considering our interactionality of privileged and marginalized identities? What have been the missed opportunities? How are we unwittingly serving as what Kivel calls the buffer class between the 1% and the lowest earning 80%? By identifying such instances and learning from them, we aim to facilitate discussion of how we can instigate meaningful changes as social change agents.

As feminist psychologists, we value generativity, mentoring the next generation, and working together for social change. These values can lead us to take on a multitude of responsibilities, resulting in overwork, stress, and an unbalanced life. Feminists from marginalized groups (e.g., sexual minorities, underrepresented ethnic/racial minorities) can be especially vulnerable to overwork, as they receive many requests to serve and may feel a special sense of responsibility to ensure that multiple perspectives are represented. Overwork and imbalance are unsustainable, yet simply saying "no" to service requests is not necessarily the best option, especially if the underlying goals are ones we share. How can we navigate the tension between our feminist values and the inability to do it all? This session will provide a venue for participants to share experiences and strategies. The facilitators are mid-career academics and will briefly speak to these issues from their own positionality. However, we anticipate that the tension between feminist values and limited bandwidth is relevant to professors at all levels, to students and postdocs, and to therapists and others whose careers are outside of academia. The structure will depend on the number of attendees and may include: discussions in pairs or trios, brief individual sharing, large group discussion, or brainstorming about a particular specific dilemma. If the group is small, we will allow time for each individual to present a specific situation where they felt a tension between their feminist goals and values and their ability to have a balanced life. If the group is larger, we will first generate specific questions via large group discussion, and then break into smaller groups to discuss one or more of those questions. In all cases, we'll come back to the large group at the end, and provide a summary of insights and strategies.

As psychology continues in its journey of multicultural awareness and inclusion, academic programs strive to make their faculty more diverse, particularly recruiting women of color psychologists. However, some women of color academics might argue that the academe is still an unwelcoming environment and that fosters “ambiguous empowerment” (Turner, 2002). Women of color often experience being treated as a “token” and feel pressured to assimilate while also serving as sole ambassadors for their culture and cultures of other minority individuals (Kanter, 1977). These can lead to increased levels of stress and job dissatisfaction for women of color as they try to navigate authenticity between their person and professional selves (Hume, 1998). The purpose of this roundtable is to provide an opportunity for women of color to share their experiences in professional psychology (both practice and academic) and provide safe space for psychologists to brainstorm how to make counseling psychology a more inclusive environment for women of color. In particular, the discussion will be centered around experiences of multiple marginality, making academic and professional programs more aware of the unique challenges that women of color face and to help make campuses more inclusive for this unique population.

Given the growing number of women of color in clinical, teaching, administration and leadership positions in higher education, it is imperative to explore how women of color may be perceived and treated in these roles. We plan to facilitate a discussion that addresses (a) the navigation of maintaining and asserting one’s multifaceted identity in the workplace in the midst of assumed identities and stereotypes based on physical appearance, (b) the intersection between cultural identities and (c) workplace dynamics and positions of power. This structured discussion targets the growing number of women of color in institutions of higher education. The increase in women of color in these positions has presented university environments with novel multicultural challenges and opportunities. The conversation will provide a forum for participants to discuss multicultural and social justice issues experienced across different settings and contexts in higher education as well as opportunity to learn and share strategies to address challenging and distressing experiences. The facilitators will have pre-designed questions and 1-2 vignettes to stimulate a critical dialogue. We will provide insights from our experiences as women of color with other intersecting identities, and encourage participants to self-reflect and share their experiences, as well. We hope that this structured discussion will be conducive to greater understanding, awareness and personal reflection.