Speaker 1: Welcome to Almost Dr. Armas. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out, and if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. In this channel, I talk about my life as a PhD student in clinical psychology and bring you information about the mental health field. Today is March 8th and it's International Women's Day, which is a day to celebrate and honor every woman in your life, and it's also a great way to celebrate and honor the women who have changed the world and blazed a trail for us. So with that, I want to take you guys on a journey today through history to highlight some of the most influential women in the field of psychology. Research by the American Psychological Association shows that 76% of doctoral students in psychology are women, 74% of early career psychologists are women, and women make up over 50% of the psychology workforce. But this wasn't always the case, because psychology used to be a male-dominated field, and like in all male-dominated fields in psychology, a lot of women did not get the credit that they deserve for the work that they did or contributed to. So the purpose of today's video is going to be to highlight those women psychologists and give them the credit that they're due. First, we have Anna Freud, who is Sigmund Freud's daughter, and we know that Freud is often known as the father of psychoanalysis. So Anna Freud expanded her father's work and established the field of child psychoanalysis, and that eventually became what we know today as child psychology in pediatric psychology. And she actually is the one that introduced the concept of defense mechanisms, which we still talk about today. Next, we have Mary Whiten Calkins, and she was denied admission to Harvard because she was a woman, but she unofficially studied there anyway and completed all the necessary requirements for a PhD in psychology, even though she was never technically granted the degree by Harvard. And Calkins ended up being the first female president of the American Psychological Association, which we know of as APA. Next, we have Mary Ainsworth, who is basically the founder of attachment theory, and attachment theory is based on the relationship between a child and their primary caregiver, which back then was considered the mother. And she designed a study called The Strange Situation, and these experiments basically had a mother and a baby sit in an unfamiliar room, and then the researchers observed how the baby reacted to different situations, like a stranger entering the room while mom was there, the mother leaving the room, and leaving the baby in there with a stranger, and then the mother coming back in. And basically what they derived from the baby's reactions were different attachment styles. Based on how the parent-child relationship was, children exhibited different types of behavior. And we still talk about attachment styles and attachment theory today. Another very influential psychologist is Lita Sutter Hollingworth. She did intelligence research and worked with gifted children during a time when that kind of research was only done with males. And based on her research, she proved that women were equally intelligent and capable as men, and back then it was believed that women were intellectually inferior. So we can thank her for proving our equality in intellect. Next, we have Karen Horney. She actually got her medical degree in Germany in 1913, and she's known for being involved in feminine psychology. She basically took a neo or new Freudian approach, and as I spoke of earlier, Freud is known for psychoanalysis, and he actually coined a term called penis envy, and that was the idea that women behave the way that they do because they wish that they had the same anatomy as men. And actually, Karen Horney challenged that and stated that men have womb envy, which was the idea that all men's actions are driven by the need to overcompensate for the fact that they cannot bear children. Now, psychoanalysis isn't as popular as it used to be, and we now know that Freud got many things right, but also a lot of things wrong. But either way, we know that Freud, as well as Karen Horney, had a huge influence on the field of psychology. Next, we have Melanie Klein, who basically helped design play therapy, which is still something that we use today in work with children. And back then, she believed that children couldn't be psychoanalyzed, so playing with them and talking to them was a better way to get a sense of what they're going through. Next, Christine Ladd-Franklin. She is known for advocating for women's rights in academia, and she challenged Edward Tichenor, who is actually another famous psychologist. She challenged him because he wouldn't allow women into his work groups, and Christine wanted to work with him at Johns Hopkins, where she completed a dissertation on the logic of algebra. But the university refused to grant her her PhD until 42 years later, in 1926. So obviously, we're talking about a time where men were predominantly studying science and being granted degrees, and women were completing the same requirements, but not being given the titles that they deserved. And on that topic, we have Margaret Floyd Washburn, who was actually the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology. She was actually the first student to study under Edward Tichenor, who I mentioned earlier, and she studied animal cognition and developed a motor theory of cognition, which suggests that the body's movements have an influence on our thoughts. And that informed a whole bunch of research that we still are doing today. Next, we have Eleanor McCovey. She was the first to study sex differences on socialization and gender roles, and she was also the first woman to chair the psych department at Stanford University, and she calls herself the first woman to lecture in a pantsuit at Stanford University. And her work informed decades and decades of work that we do today on sex differences. I learned so much when I was researching this topic to share with you guys. I found a lot of information on women of color in psychology and how they change the field. So the next few people I'm going to mention are all the different women of color who basically blazed a trail for women of their own background in the field. And that's super important to me because part of the reason why I studied psychology is because I want to increase representation of Latinx women in the field. So it was really cool to see all the different women and firsts that they were able to accomplish. So in 1912, Tsuruku Haraguchi was the first Japanese woman to earn a PhD in any field, and she actually chose to earn a PhD in psychology, and she studied mental fatigue. In 1933, Inez Prosser was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in psychology, and she studied segregation in schools and children's adjustment based on that. In 1942, Estefania Aldaba Lim was the first Filipino woman to earn a PhD in psychology, and she later became the co-founder of the Philippine Association of Psychologists and the Philippine Mental Health Association. Then we have Mamie Clark, who is a super influential African-American psychologist. You probably have heard of her, and if you haven't, in 1946 she founded the Northside Center for Child Development, and obviously from that you know that she studied child development, and more specifically she studied racial self-awareness in children, and she did this really cool study where she showed children baby dolls, and some were black and some were white, and she asks the children questions like, show me the good doll, show me the bad doll, and based on that she was able to see the underlying stereotypes that children learn at such an early age, and her work was actually used in 1954 to inform the Supreme Court case Brown versus Board of Ed, which is the case where racial segregation in schools was deemed illegal. That's huge, and that was actually also the first time in history that social science research was used in the Supreme Court. Then in 1952, Mary Gold Linton was the first Native American woman to earn a PhD in psychology, and she was actually the first Native American woman from a reservation in California to ever go to college at all, so she didn't stop at the bachelor's. She went all the way to the PhD and has studied and continues to study long-term memory, and she also co-founded the Society for the Advancement of Chicano and Native Americans in Science, and in 1957 we have Evelyn Hooker who did experiments showing that homosexuality is not a mental disorder. Even though the DSM, the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Disorders, didn't remove homosexuality until 1973, her studies are the basis for which we saw that there's no detectable difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals in their mental adjustment. No difference, and that was the basis for the change in the DSM and part of the reason why we don't consider homosexuality to be a disorder today, so that's major. In 1962, Martha Bernal was the first Latina to earn a PhD in psychology, and she assisted with the establishment of the Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs in the APA, the American Psychological Association, and she also founded the National Hispanic Psychology Association. This was super cool for me because, like I said in previous videos, I'm also Latina and I realized that 1962 is really not that far away. That means that Latinas haven't really been in the field for that long, and on one hand that's super disappointing, but on the other hand it's really exciting to be kind of part of the first hundred years of people in the field with my background. I think representation is super important, and part of the reason why I do this YouTube channel is to give people the information about studying psychology and getting a PhD and doing mental health work from any background because you can do so much when you have the access and when you see people doing things that you want to do who actually look like you, so this was super cool for me to learn. I never knew who the first Latina to get a PhD in psychology was, and it's really cool that there may be something in my career that I'm the first Latina to do. Next we have E. Kitchchild. She's another African-American woman who was super influential in psychology. In 1969 she co-founded the Association for Women Psychologists, and she's basically known for being a psychologist but also for being an advocate who was dedicated to black women's experiences, feminism, AIDS, and working with other marginalized groups, and what's really cool is that the list of women's accomplishments in psychology just continues to go on. In 1971, Carol and Apnee formed the network of Indian psychologists. In 1979, Harriet McAdoo was appointed to the White House Conference on Families by President Carter, and she was the first African-American woman to be appointed, and she studied African-American families living in Washington DC with her husband, and they were the first researchers to challenge the long-held racial stereotypes that people had about black families and present them in a positive light. In 1984, Lilian Comas-Diaz was named the Director of the Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs at the American Psychological Association, so you can see a trend with the APA where more and more women, and then more and more women of color, are being integrated into the leadership, which is amazing. In 1992, Hope Landry wrote The Politics of Madness, and she basically argued that psychiatric disorders are maintaining the inequalities that are already existing in society among certain groups, and so her work focused on racial and ethnic disparities in health, in women's health, in poverty, and in discrimination. And around the same time, Charlotte Patterson was also working to show that kids raised by gay and lesbian parents were actually no different than children who were raised by heterosexual parents, and she's known as the world's expert on psychological research on children and youths raised by lesbian and gay parents. Then in 1995, Hortencia Amaro established the Latin American Health Institute and Multicultural AIDS Coalition. She is a Latina psychologist who did a lot of research on AIDS among the Latin American population, because along with African-Americans, Latinx people are disproportionately affected by HIV. In 2002, Teresa LaFromboise won the Distinguishing Career Contribution to Research Award, and she was actually the first person to conduct an evidence-based suicide prevention intervention with Native American youth. In 2009, Judy Chu was the first Chinese American woman elected to the Congress, and she's actually also a psychologist, and she worked to reduce mental health stigma in the Asian American community and Pacific Islander community, and tried to increase access to culturally appropriate mental health services. In 2011, Melva Vasquez was the first Latina president of the American Psychological Association. In 2014, Jennifer Eberhardt received the MacArthur Genius Award for her work on racial stereotypes and criminal sentencing. In the same year, Agnes Torres-Hernandez, a transgender Mexican psychologist and researcher, was granted her degree after her death in 2012 by Veracruz University. Agnes was an advocate for LGBTQ rights and conducted LGBTQ research. Veracruz University originally denied her degree because she was trying to get her degree in in her new name, Agnes, but she was granted the degree after her death in 2014. Also in 2014, psychologist Brenda Milner was awarded the Cavill Prize of Neuroscience. She's actually known as the founder of neuropsychology, and she continues to work and supervise students even though she is over 100 years old. There are so many other women who I found while I was doing the research for this video, and so many influential psychologists that you guys definitely need to hear about, but I can't possibly begin to name them all, and it was honestly really encouraging to see how women have blazed a trail in psychology. I hope that you also learned a lot watching this video. I really appreciate your time. Again, I'm Almost Dr. Armas. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. If you liked this video, please make sure to hit the thumbs up, subscribe to my channel, and also check back in next time.