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Contents
- Abstract
- Black Women in the Academy
- Psychology in Racial Context
- The Mentor Role and Black Women
- The Next Generation Mentoring Program
- Selection Process
- Format and Content of the Program
- The Five Goals
- 1. Reducing isolation
- 2. Deconstructing the research subculture in graduate departments
- 3. Detailing the mentoring process
- 4. Preparing for bicultural lives as professional Black women
- 5. Highlighting the need for self-care
- Outcome Data
- Sample fifth-year reunion comments
- Cautions
- Summary
Abstract
Black women remain grossly underrepresented in academic psychology departments at major American universities. With better representation, their intellectual contributions to research, practice, and education in the discipline could significantly expand the margins of the field. Given the positive effect of Black faculty on priming the pipeline of graduate students, increasing the number of Black faculty would likely improve the recruitment and retention of Black graduate students. A pilot mentoring group designed specifically for Black female psychologists with a commitment to academic research careers provided significant beneficial experiences and demonstrated good success in the desired direction.
Black women stand at the demographic intersection of race and gender. In major American universities they remain underrepresented at all ranks, especially among the tenured faculty. Black women constitute 1.1% of professors and 2.4% of associate professors (Digest of Education Statistics, 2006). The same pattern holds in departments of psychology (i.e., Blacks and women remain underrepresented among the tenured faculty). During the 2005–2006 academic year, Black faculty members composed 4% of the faculty in doctoral departments of psychology. Black female members constituted 3% of all faculty members and 6% of female faculty members (American Psychological Association Center for Psychology Workforce Analysis and Research, 2007).
Given their rarity and lack of role models, Black women junior faculty may fail to see themselves as promotable and tenurable in psychology departments. The pilot mentoring program described here represented an intentional effort to counter the double adverse odds of race and gender: assisting Black women psychologists to successfully pursue an academic career. The program, named Next Generation (NG), was designed as a mentoring program for early career Black female psychologists interested in pursuing academic research careers in psychology. NG focused on early career psychologists, defined as having earned their doctorates within the prior 7...