Toward a More Just Feminism

Abstract

The history of the women’s movements and women’s involvement in civic causes and actions shows that commitment to women’s causes is no guarantee that other human rights issues will be supported. Instances of racism and other prejudices that have impacted women’s groups in the United States will be used to illustrate the contradiction, and corollary patterns from the present will be used to show that the disconnect between promoting women’s causes and other pressing human rights issues remains. I will use the exemplar of citation practices as one aspect of contemporary professional behavior that may contribute to the ongoing invisibility of accomplishments by women and scholars of color of any gender. I will also demonstrate some tools that, combined with better self-awareness, can improve the visibility of all members of underrepresented groups. The challenge we face is to convert awareness of the complex intersections between gender and racial issues into the application of feminist values across the full spectrum of human experience.

Keywords

feminism white feminism racism sexism history intersectionality

We hope that our feminist values will generalize beyond gender issues, but the evidence from both historical and contemporary events shows that neither feminist principles nor membership in women’s organizations guarantees positive beliefs about human rights in general. In this article, I will first review examples from the historical record and contemporary affairs illustrating the disconnect. Next, I will use the example of citation practices to show that the disconnect extends to professional behaviors and how, with better self-awareness, we can bridge the gap between professed values and practice.

Background

Nineteenth-Twentieth Century U.S. Women’s Movements

As we approach the centennial of the 19th amendment to the United States (U.S.) Constitution (https://constitutionus.com), in which the U.S. or any U.S. state is prohibited from denying voting rights because of sex, legacies of the battles from prior eras linger. As we are giving much needed modern attention to the early women’s rights movements, the ugly history of White women’s adherence to White supremacy is garnering increased and needed scrutiny. Neither the racism and segregation within women’s suffrage groups nor the diversity of participants working for suffrage and women’s rights has been sufficiently acknowledged. Martha Jones has written extensively on the roles of Black women activists in the suffrage and human rights movements (Jones, 2007, 2019a; Lemay & Jones, 2019). Jones (2007), for example, profiled early rights champions such as Hester Lane, a Black woman anti-slavery activist who was nonetheless unsuccessful in joining the leadership of an anti-slavery group in 1840, in contrast to the eventual success of Abby Kelley, a White woman. Jones saw “sex and color…emerging as the roots of two mutually exclusive political movements” (p. 92). The comparison of Black men’s and White women’s situations “rendered [Black women] politically invisible” (p. 92).

An overview by Brent Staples (2018) in the New York Times, “How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women,” highlighted several other works by historians examining the roles of Black women in the suffrage movement and how racism was intertwined with the women’s rights movements. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, who died only a few months after Staples’s essay (Seelye, 2019), authored a groundbreaking work in this field. In African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, Terborg-Penn (1998) described the difficulties in recovering names and stories of Black women who participated in the suffrage movement. She reported that in the first volume of the movement’s history, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage, neither the best-known Black woman in the movement, Sojourner Truth, nor any other Black women were pictured. Excerpts from Truth’s speeches were virtually the only indication of Black women’s participation (TerborgPenn, 1998, pp. 14–15). Terborg-Penn’s book brought vital recognition of Black women’s roles in all aspects of the voting rights drives, and identification of individuals—not only better-known activists (e.g., Ida Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell) but also those less frequently recognized (e.g., Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and S. Willie Layton).

Lori Ginzberg’s (2010) biography of first wave women’s movement icon Elizabeth Cady Stanton further contributed to exposing Stanton’s racism (cf., Terborg-Penn, 1998, p. 6). The Ginzberg biography demonstrated that a proper evaluation of Stanton’s legacy as a human rights advocate could not ignore Stanton’s racism and other prejudices. Ginzberg further observed that “the limitations in [Stanton’s] thinking have shaped some of the limitations in more contemporary movements for social change, feminism included” (p. 192). Stanton failed to “allow her political imagination to include the myriad people who were outside the borders of her particular American experience” (p. 193), including not seeing her privilege to be “as narrow a perch as anyone else’s” (p. 193).

The entanglement of racism with White women’s activism and their proximity to power is also illustrated by the much less well-known post-Civil War group, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), whose history was examined in a prizewinning book by Karen L. Cox (2003, new preface 2019). Cox examined the UDC’s contributions to the propaganda that helped to perpetuate myths about the Civil War. Cox summarized the UDC’s revisionist Civil War history as one that “vindicated Confederate men, recorded the sacrifices of Confederate women, and exonerated the South” (p. 94), rather than denouncing slavery, racism, Jim Crow laws, and the organized terrorist actions of the tacitly state-supported Ku Klux Klan (KKK). To further their campaign, the UDC supported the production and collection of articles and books, and sponsored scholarships and essay contests. One UDC member, Laura Martin Rose, was a famed KKK apologist, who portrayed “Klansmen as chivalrous knights” and “regarded Klan activities as necessary to restore law and order to the region and to restore Anglo-Saxon supremacy to the South” (p. 108). The UDC’s ability to disseminate their doctrine is shown by the use of Rose’s laudatory essay on the KKK in Mississippi schools, and more generally, by their active monitoring of textbooks to assure compliance with the UDC’s favored ideology (ch. 7). Beyond textbooks, Cox also describes the actions taken by UDC women at home and through local schools “to immerse students—literally—in Confederate culture” (p. 127).

The UDC is an example of how a woman’s group made a substantial impact on scholarship and culture; unfortunately, however, in support of White supremacy and racism. The theories of the Civil War promoted by the UDC that ignore the southern states’ slavery as the root cause have persisted, even in the face of Civil War historians’ near-unanimous consensus that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War (e.g., McPherson, 1988). The Pew Research Center (2011) polled U.S. adults on the causes of the Civil War as the 150th anniversary of the conflict approached. The correct answer, slavery, came in second, with 38%. The most common answer, chosen by 48% of the respondents, was the incorrect justification of states’ rights. The UDC example is a clear indication that simply because women cross gender stereotypical borders to engage in what might be considered traditionally masculine actions does not guarantee that those women will be supportive of any other marginalized group or social justice issues.

Current Examples

A lingering but not new assumption is that women may be less likely to exhibit racist or other prejudicial attitudes (e.g., anti-immigrant bias) than will men (e.g., Junn, 2017), an assumption that frequently fails both historical analysis and current empirical examinations. For example, Terborg-Penn (1998) described how in the first wave of suffrage movements, “Blacks attempted to demonstrate that [Black and White] disenfranchised women shared the common plight of oppression” (p. 109). Nonetheless, “many [White] woman suffrage advocates…moved…more toward the goal of enfranchising only white women” (p. 109).

Kathleen Belew’s (2019) study of modern White supremacy groups in the U.S. considered the roles of White women and the ideal of White womanhood that is part of the group ideology. Exploiting a fear of Black sexuality is not a new issue in the U.S. and can be traced at least to early colonial times and chattel slavery (Collins, 2004). The current White supremacy groups’ use of claims that they are protecting White women from “them”—frequently African American men, but also Jewish individuals, immigrants, and other targets of White supremacist hatred—was a tactic that Belew showed sometimes helped gain an acquittal for those group members charged with violent or destructive acts. The participation by the White women in the groups studied by Belew also echoes the earlier active participation of White women in the U.S. south in enslaving, brutalizing, and profiting from the enslavement of African Americans, documented by Stephanie Jones-Rogers (2019).

An analysis of anti-refugee protests in Finland by Suki Keskinen (2018) also showed that women’s activism could link traditional feminist issues with others that ordinarily would not be associated with a social justice-oriented feminism. Keskinen characterized the actions by the women who were opposing refugees as “white border guard femininities” (p. 160). The White women who engaged in protests at borders and who organized on social media co-opted a feminist peace initiative aimed at violence against women to support their anti-refugee and anti-Muslim activities. Keskinen described their ideological stance in this way:

White border guard femininities draw on both traditional definitions of femininity connected to motherhood, children and family, and liberal understandings of gender equality, while performing racist acts. This rearticulation of gender equality only opposes male power when concerned with Muslims and non-white men (p. 161).

Both Belew’s (2019) and Keskinen’s (2018) examples are consistent with recent research by Jean McMahon and Kimberly Kahn (2018), showing that the protective paternalistic aspect of ambivalent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996) was linked to racism.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election contest, White women’s actions were scrutinized by some with surprise (e.g., Golshan, 2017), because of the failure of White women to support a White woman candidate who advocated policies presumably favored by members of marginalized groups of all genders (e.g., Center for American Women and Politics, 2012; Setzler & Yanus, 2018; Tropp & Uluğ, 2019). Specifically, following a campaign marked by openly racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant statements by the Republican candidate Donald Trump (e.g., Tolbert et al., 2018), exit polls showed that although overall women were more likely to support the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump (54% vs. 41%, respectively), disaggregating the data by race told a different story. White women favored Trump over Clinton (52% vs. 43%, respectively), and White women were the only racial subgroup of women surveyed to show this pattern (CNN politics, 2016). This pattern, however, should not have been a surprise as it was consistent with White women’s voting in modern U.S. presidential elections (Campi & Junn, 2019; Junn, 2017).

It is also not new that White feminists in particular are being scrutinized (e.g., hooks, 1990; McIntyre, 2000; Smith, 1982). One can argue that the attitudes of White feminists may be distinct from the White women in the UDC, the white supremacist groups, White women slaveholders, the Finland border guards, or White women in general. Presumably, a comparison of women in the aforementioned groups with White women who claim to be feminists would show significant differences across a variety of social issues (cf., Tropp & Uluğ, 2019). Nonetheless, as Mariana Ortega (2006) described, White feminists exhibit a “loving, knowing ignorance,” which she defined as “an ignorance of the thought and experience of women of color that is accompanied by both alleged love for and alleged knowledge about them” (para. 3). This “loving ignorance” ignores the reality that “racism empowers white women to act as exploiters and oppressors” (hooks, 1990, p. 187). Trudy (2013) referred to this as “mainstream feminism,” in which the “feminists most often allowed to occupy this space…cisgender, heterosexual, thin, middle class White women with citizenship.…affirm existing hierarchies and aren’t intersectional” (para. 3).

In just the past few years there have been incidents that illustrate Trudy’s (2013) conception of mainstream feminism as “most visible to the masses.…and the one that dominates credit” (para. 4). Trudy herself and colleague Moya Bailey, both Black women, experienced erasure of their pioneering efforts. Specifically, after Bailey coined the term misogynoir to refer to anti-Black racist misogyny and Trudy elaborated on the concept and its applications (Bailey & Trudy, 2018; Trudy, 2014), their writings were frequently uncredited or stolen (Bailey & Trudy, 2018). Other examples include Tarana Burke, an African American woman, being repeatedly denied credit for beginning the #MeToo focus on sexual assault in 2006 in her workshops (Burke, 2017; Tambe, 2018); outrage over harassment of women online focusing mainly on White women victims (Jones, 2016; Mantilla, 2015); and a proposal to erect a New York City statue commemorating the 19th amendment that featured only Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Jones, 2019b)—Sojourner Truth was added only after protests over the exclusion of Black women (Dobnik, 2019).

These examples illustrate a key problem Ortega (2006) discussed: that White feminists have only made superficial efforts to incorporate the work of women of color in their writing (and presumably other professional actions) while also continuing to center their own perspectives. Thus, the problem of recognition for accomplishments by women of color has persisted (see also Smith, 2018), even though some of the original voices who identified the problem are regularly cited: “those few but revered names that are invoked whenever a work must show its…mindfulness of the experience of women of color” (Ortega, para. 3). Sara Ahmed (2017) reminded us that “feminism is at stake in how we generate knowledge” (p. 14), viewing citation as “feminist memory….how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before” (pp. 15–16).

The recent surge in research on intersectionality (see Collins, 2015; Warner, 2018), for some data on these increases) also means that the origins and meaning of intersectionality must be accurately represented. As documented by Patricia Hill Collins (2015), one of the major writers on intersectionality and related concepts, works by U.S. Black feminists in the mid-20th century (e.g., Collins, 2004; Combahee River Collective, 1982; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Lorde, 2007) identified key goals as

empower[ing] African American women through critical analyses of how mutually constructing systems of oppression of race, class, gender, and sexuality framed the social issues and social inequalities that Black women faced (p. 8).

Brittney Cooper (2015), in an afterword to an influential collection of Black feminist thought (Hull et al., 1982), similarly summarized the origins of intersectionality, as well as identifying an ongoing problem:

Though the term intersectionality did not exist in 1982, the problem that it named when Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989 was the same problem that the editors…named when they proclaimed that “all the women are white and all the blacks are men” (Cooper, 2015, p. 357).

Unfortunately, the reasons for the origins of the intersectionality construct in the work of Black women feminists frequently have been ignored, brushed aside, or misused, in what Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2012) referred to as “resubjugating black women’s knowledge” (p. 1). AlexanderFloyd (p. 8) expanded on two dangers identified by Crenshaw (1991) that could occur when intersectionality is invoked (see also similar concerns identified by Ijeoma Oluo, 2019). One is “bait-and-switch,” in which a focus on Black women is used to pivot to the travails of White women. The other is the “universalizing tendency,” in which an issue first identified as a crisis for Black women is relabeled as impacting all women, and therefore has the effect of decentering the persons for whom the concern was originally identified.

As I will detail below, much evidence has accumulated to show that women’s publications are not receiving the same recognition as men’s, but much less attention has been given to comparable discrepancies by race or ethnicity, and virtually none to their intersections. As documented in recent research reviewed below, it is a problem in multiple disciplines for all women that their contributions are minimized, ignored, or appropriated (e.g., Kitchener, 2019, describing what happened to historian Sarah Milov). At the same time, “psychology of women and gender now comprises a vast trove of empirical work, albeit one that remains Western-centric and deficient in its coverage of minoritized groups” (Marecek, 2019, p. 428). If feminist psychology is to escape the bonds of White or mainstream feminism, then actions to target the problem of invisible or disappeared knowledge must take into account more than gender and move away from universalizing women as White women.

Giving better attention to the works cited when we are using or sharing information is something that we as instructors, authors, editors, clinicians, counselors, or consultants can do to improve diversity and inclusion and expand the boundaries of our thinking and knowledge. I will review past citation guidelines in psychology, describe methods being used in other disciplines, and apply those methods as one way to improve practice. The actions I propose are not a comprehensive solution but can be implemented by anyone. Attention to diversifying the authors we cite can make a difference, is one that potentially can be tracked and quantified, and most important, models ethical behavior.

Increasing the Visibility of Women and Other Members of Underrepresented Groups

Members of underrepresented groups of any gender and other women continue to be undercited, underrecognized, and overburdened with service (e.g., Bolles, 2013; Chakravartty et al., 2018; Nittrouer et al., 2018). In the area of citations specifically, recent work has documented that women authors and authors of color of any gender are cited less frequently (e.g., Bolles, 2013; Chakravartty et al., 2018; Fox & Paine, 2019; Holman et al., 2018; Maliniak et al., 2013). Some of the gender disparity may be due to men being more likely to cite their own work than are women (e.g., King et al., 2017; Maliniak et al., 2013). There are also concerns that reducing the gaps while progressing at the current rates may take a long time (e.g., Holman et al., 2018).

Before describing ideas for improving practice, I provide an illustrative piece of the background in psychology and its dominant style guide (American Psychological Association [APA], 2010, 2020). The standard now for reference lists in APA style is to use the following format: last or family name, comma, initials of given name or names. APA style did not always use the current initials-only format for given names. When I started graduate school, studying with Carolyn Wood Sherif (see Shields & Signorella, 2014), I noticed something odd while examining the reference list in an earlier text in social psychology that Carolyn had co-authored (Sherif & Sherif, 1969). Although the APA style for references in use at that time was similar to the current ones (APA, 1974), the 1969 book had the given names of some authors spelled out, whereas others were only listed with initials. Furthermore, the given names that were spelled out were all names typically assigned to women (a sample page is available in the supplemental materials: https://osf.io/dtbq8/). I recall feeling outraged that there were different citation styles by gender, as I assumed that this practice was a means to signal to those who might have concerns about women authors to be wary of the source, leading perhaps to what historian of science Margaret Rossiter (1993) identified as the “Matilda effect,” which occurs when women’s contributions are ignored or usurped. I regret now that I did not think to ask Carolyn about the reference style in her book.

In researching the origins of the old practice of only marking women authors, I have not been able to locate a written explanation. In an APA Style Blog post on the origins of the APA style manual, Anne Breitenbach (2016) identified the start of APA style in a 1929 Psychological Bulletin article (Bentley et al., 1929). The 1929 recommendations for reference list formats do not include any mention of author gender, but all examples use last name and first name initials. The next statement on APA style came in another Psychological Bulletin article by John Anderson and Willard Valentine (1944), in which they provided gendered reference instructions without explanation. Writers were cautioned to put “an article by a married woman under the name which appears on the article” (p. 370) and that “[i]n typing authors’ names if the author is a man, only the initials are given for the first names; if the author is a woman, the first name is spelled out” (p. 374). How one determines the gender of the author or a woman’s marital status is not explained. Similar rules are again presented but not explained in the 1952 (APA & Council of Editors, 1952, p. 432) and 1957 (APA, Council of Editors, 1957, p. 51) style guides, although in 1957 it is reported that the Journal of Experimental Psychology is an exception and “uses only the initials of female authors” (p. 51).

Reverting to the earlier gender-marked format would be objectionable, but in correcting one problem, a potential new one was created. Janis Bohan (1992) identified the drawback in the introduction to her collection of classics in research on women and gender: Seldom Seen, Rarely Heard: Women’s Place in Psychology. Bohan (p. 38) contended that the use of initials rather than given names might serve to obscure the contributions of women (see also Bernstein & Russo, 1974). I wonder if the use of the older APA style in Sherif and Sherif (1969) reflected the desire to keep Carolyn Sherif’s contributions to the Sherif and Sherif partnership visible. Bohan (1992) took the step of writing out the full names of all cited references in her introduction reference list, a practice I am trying to emulate where possible in the body of this paper, even if I cannot change the reference list format. Nancy Felipe Russo (1999), a former APA Division 35 president, described how she pushed to have full names of all be the APA reference format:

My position was rejected, however, when the members of the committee found out its cost and they became persuaded that as long as historical researchers had access to full names in original articles, cost issues should have priority when it came to references. Today, historical researchers have ready access to the names of authors through PsychINFO Online as well (p. 401).

The new 7th edition of APA style (APA, 2020) mandates the following citation styles. In the body of the paper we are to use author-date (p. 260), which means last or family name of the author and year. Some writers do include a full name in the body of the paper, but given the orthodox recommendation, I am confi that most do not or will not. There is also a change from the previous edition (APA, 2010) in that in-text citations with more than two authors are now to be immediately shortened to FirstAuthorLastName et al. (p. 265). Another change was made in the numbers of authors allowed to be listed in the reference list before being truncated, from 6 to 20. Revealing more authors may help reveal more diversity, but the first or given names are still reduced to initials. Thus, there are continued and new lost opportunities to easily recognize the presence of diversity (or lack thereof) in a publication.

In using the APA citation style example, I am not trying to imply that writing out the full names of authors in reference lists will solve all visibility issues. I do believe that reference lists in pivotal articles, books, and course syllabi can serve as a significant gateway to an area of study. Even within feminist texts in anthropology, Bolles (2013) found that works by “African American feminist anthropologists” were not “recognized and cited by anthropologists, including those who count as allies and colleagues” (p. 66). Given the automatic processing of information that all humans are doing, with a lifetime of exposure to the biases that saturate our environments, continuing to mask the author characteristics can help perpetuate those biases (cf., Smith et al., 2010, on issues of gender and language in APA style). The use of full names can aid in assessing whether authors are members of underrepresented groups. Race or ethnicity assessments are likely not as accurate as gender assessments (e.g., Sumner, n.d.), but as I will describe below, possible.

Campaigns by other disciplines to counter the lack of visibility are instructive. One of the earliest campaigns, Women Also Know Stuff, is a political science effort that dates to early 2016 (Blain & Wulf, 2018). Women Also Know Stuff has a twitter account (https://twitter.com/womenalsoknow), hashtag (#WomenAlsoKnowStuff), and website (womenalsoknowstuff.com), the latter of which includes a database featuring “political scientists who identify as women” (Women Also Know Stuff, 2019). The executive committee members are Amber Boydstun, Nadia Brown, Kim Dionne, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Melissa Michelson, Kerri Milta, Layna Mosley, Stella Rouse, Kathleen Searles, and Christina Wolbrecht (https://womenalsoknowstuff.com/committee). Women Also Know Stuff also supports other similar efforts, including collections that highlight LGBTQ + scholars and scholars of color (e.g., People of Color Also Know Stuff, @POCalsoknow). In spite of this recognition that there need to be efforts beyond gender, the executive committee members for Women Also Know Stuff appear to be predominantly White.

Another important effort, therefore, is Cite Black Women (www.citeblackwomencollective.org; @CiteBlackWomen; podcast: https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/our-pod-cast.html). The web site, social media presence, and podcast are intended to

motivate everyone, but particularly academics, to critically reflect on their everyday practices of citation and start to consciously question how they can incorporate black women into the CORE of their work (Cite Black Women, n.d., para. 2).

The campaign was started in November 2017 by Christen Smith (n.d.), an anthropologist, and she is joined in the effort by the other members of the collective: Zakiya Carr Johnson, Jenn M. Jackson, Erica Lorraine Williams, Ashanté Reese, Daina Ramey Berry, Bianca C. Williams, Yasmiyn Irizarry, Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Alysia Mann Carey, Michaela Machicote, and Imani A. Wadud (Johnson et al., n.d.).

Both of these web sites also display their hashtags using capital letters to mark individual words (#WomenAlsoKnowStuff #CiteBlackWomen, #CiteBlackWomenSundays). This hashtag format is crucial for any person who is accessing the internet with a screen reader (Cahalane, 2018), as another important feminist goal should be to make one’s work as accessible as possible to persons with disabilities (cf., Martha Banks’s APA Division 35 presidential address on feminist psychology and disabilities, 2010).

As I have found no examples of similar campaigns specifically for psychology, let me recommend two possible solutions that can be used to increase the likelihood that syllabi, reference lists, and reading recommendations include writings by members of underrepresented groups. The first solution is the online tool developed by a political scientist, Jane Sumner (2018). Sumner’s program (Sumner, n.d.) uses probability estimates that names are likely to be associated with gender or race, and therefore can be used by any discipline. The gender estimates are derived from an application of genderize.io (https://genderize.io), which uses social media data to make the gender estimates (Sumner, 2018). Some research on gender and citation counts has used genderize.io (e.g., Holman et al., 2018); others have used U.S. Social Security data (e.g., King et al., 2017). Sumner (2018) believes that because the social security lists are U.S.-specifi they are therefore more limited than the data collected by genderize.io. All methods are limited by not recognizing nonbinary individuals. The program Sumner uses for the race and ethnicity estimates is an R package, wru (Khanna & Imai, 2019), which was based on Imai and Khanna’s (2016) deployment of Census and other data to produce race and ethnicity probability estimates.

To illustrate how Sumner’s program operates, I used my reading list from one of my spring 2019 classes. As I prepared the reading list for class, I did not use any process other than my own attention to try to construct an inclusive reading list. In my writing I have been examining my reference lists as I have reflected on the citation disparities over the past year. For my classes in which I was assigning journal articles as the core readings, however, I somewhat mindlessly focused more on the topics.

To test my spring reading list for gender and racial diversity, I created a text file that had the full names of all authors for papers assigned (the file is shown in supplemental materials at https://osf.io/dtbq8/). Every digital copy of an article had the full names of the authors, so I was fairly easily able to copy and paste the names into the text file and delete any unneeded pieces. I then uploaded the file to Jane Sumner’s site (Sumner, n.d.). It took less than a minute for the results, which estimated 46.3% women, and a race breakdown of 2.56% Asian, 9.67% Black, 6.9% Hispanic, 2.16% other, 78.72% White. This exercise shows that at least I had some diversity in the articles assigned, but how does one evaluate the results? A possible comparison would be to the representation in a particular field (Sumner, 2018). An alternative is Christen Smith’s (2018) call to “[engage] in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production” (para. 3) by “ centering [emphasis hers] Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions” (para. 3).

The second method I will describe makes use of the availability of online CVs and websites for many professionals, in addition to the information in online databases or journal websites and requires a manual tabulation of the author characteristics (e.g., as used by Chakravartty et al., 2018 and Maliniak et al., 2013). In my process, I use a database I constructed in which I have a field for the APA style reference, a field for the full names of the authors or editors, and a field for author characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, LGBTQ + identity, or disability status derived from author web pages, news reports, or social media. This method is easily adapted to standard reference software programs, which usually import the full author names automatically into the system, and then convert first or given names to initials for the output if needed by the particular style. Note or comment fields can be used to record additional information about the authors. The most time-consuming part of the process is researching the authors, whereas the tabulation of the results is relatively quick and can be done in a spreadsheet or statistics program.

Sumner (2018) compared the results from a hand coding of author gender to the use of the probability estimates from her program (Sumner, n.d.). There were 218 names identified by hand (6.8% of those identified as women) versus 211 names identified by the online tool (9.68% identified as women). Sumner (2018) believed that the main source of inaccuracy in the online tool is that the program drops gender neutral names, unusual names, and initials only, many of which could be researched in the hand coding process, and that the drop in total names then slightly inflated the percentage of women. Sumner concluded that the online tool is accurate enough to provide an estimate of the reference list diversity and importantly is much faster than manual tabulation. I made a similar comparison to Sumner’s using the reference list for this paper and found that Sumner’s site undercounted women and Black authors, although the rank orders were the same. This example does not negate the value of the online tool in providing a quick estimate that is not as vulnerable to bias as are subjective impressions but emphasizes the importance of the manual approach.

Where Is the Intersectionality?

The research on citation bias and the efforts to raise the visibility of women’s accomplishments are failing for the most part to take an intersectional approach. In Sumner’s (n.d.) tool and in other similar functions, the computed comparisons are being made separately for gender and for race and ethnicity. I searched for any other programs that might simultaneously assess gender and race but have been unable to locate any. Sumner should be commended for including race and ethnicity along with gender, but it would be helpful for someone to develop a similar tool or function that allows estimates of the frequency of various gender and race intersections.

Research being done on biases in citations needs to more regularly consider gender and race simultaneously. Most of the studies cited earlier on gender biases in citations did not include race and ethnicity, with Bolles (2013) the exception. There remain intersecting disparities in employment in universities that can affect productivity, which then can impact citations. A recent analysis of the gender and ethnic composition of highly regarded university departments of public health and social science showed that overall equal proportions of women and men masked markedly divergent gender and ethnicity patterns across ranks (Khan et al., 2019). There were declining proportions of all women from junior to senior ranks, but there also were beginning differences in the proportions of women by ethnicity, with women classified as ethnic minority members only 19% of the junior rank compared with non-minority women at 37%. Only 9% of those at the most senior level were ethnic minority women, compared with 17% ethnic minority men, 25% non-ethnic minority women, and 45% non-minority men (from figure on p. 596).

Conclusion

The recommendations for attention to citations will help but cannot solve the diversity and inclusion problem, because, as Ortega (2006) identified, the issue is more complex than citations alone. It is not sufficient for White feminists (or any writers in positions of power and influence) to sprinkle a few well-known classics by women of color into their work, just as it is not enough to add Sojourner Truth to a suffrage centennial statue. As Angela Putman (2017) revealed in her discourse analysis of college student conceptions of White ideologies, there is a tendency to assume an objective meritocracy is at work and that accomplishments are deserved and open to all (see Warner, 2018, for a related example in teaching). In a culture in which this assumption of meritocracy is embedded in an ongoing system of racism (Feagin, 2013), concerted counteractions are needed.

What comprehensive efforts are required to make the work of scholars of color, and in particular women of color, more visible, and therefore central to academic discourse? Chakravartty et al. (2018) observed that “we often cite work we already know. Thus, one important way to counter citational disparities is to expand the range of scholarship with which we critically engage” (p. 261). Chakravartty et al. made additional constructive suggestions about concrete actions that can be taken. They call for “embedding raceand genderfocused scholarship in course syllabi, PhD exams, required reading lists, and pedagogic practice” (p. 261), challenging the composition of panels and special issues, and pushing editors, board members, and reviewers to be responsive and accountable to improving the inclusiveness of the field.

Members of marginalized groups still face inequalities in citations, authorships, speaker invitations, and editorial roles, and those disparities impact career advancement. Mindful actions to ensure that we do not continue to “cite work we already know” (Chakravartty et al., 2018, p. 261) are needed. As a White feminist committed to social justice, I demonstrated in the analysis of my class reading list my own need to be more attentive and mindful. It is imperative that feminists committed to social justice understand that a focus on gender alone without understanding the destructive, gendered dimensions of White supremacy, with the accompanying erasure of the accomplishments of Black women and women of color, will fail as human rights solutions. White feminists must do more than make shallow or self-centered gestures. APA Division 35 “provides a base for all feminists…interested in teaching, research, or practice in the psychology of women” (https://www.apa.org/about/division/div35). Given that Division 35 has a membership as of 2017 that is 62.6% White (APA, Center for Workforce Studies, 2017), a commitment by White feminists to taking the actions I propose to monitor and improve the representation of persons from underrepresented groups could make a difference. Although to do so adds steps to producing and sharing knowledge in what is already a complex, information-saturated world, these actions are necessary to reduce disparities and expand our perspectives. Espousing commitment to social justice is not enough; rather, we must all be aware of our habits and biases and help make this century’s feminism a better representative of its ideals.

Footnotes

Author Note

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Presidential Address for APA Division 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women) at the 2018 American Psychological Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA, United States.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

Funding

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

ORCID iD

Margaret L. Signorella

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