Why Black Psychologists Are Struggling to Compete With Their White colleagues
On Wednesday, Black psychologists will take to the stage at the 2016 NAACP convention in Memphis to tell the NAACP how they’ve been unfairly treated by some of their peers.
Black psychologists are underrepresented in their fields of expertise and, as such, are frequently at a disadvantage when it comes to getting hired.
They face challenges like lack of professional development, high turnover rates, and poor representation within their fields.
Black Psychologist Kaitlyn L. Johnson says that she, too, has experienced barriers.
But she says it’s not just that she’s black and she’s an African American.
Black Psychology Today, a nonprofit group of Black psychologists, published a report on Tuesday showing that white and black psychologists are roughly equally represented in their professions.
But while the report says that white psychologists are more likely to be hired and promoted, the disparity is particularly pronounced among women.
Black women are more than twice as likely as white women to be employed in psychology, but they are only 10 percent of the professional workforce, and their representation in the field is only 13 percent.
This gap could help explain why women of color are under-represented in the psychology workforce and why, as Johnson says, “there’s not enough black psychologists.”
For Johnson, the situation is even worse than that of other minority women who are less likely to get hired or promoted for the same reason.
Black and Latino women are less educated, less likely than white women who have the same educational attainment to be in the same job categories, and are more prone to drop out of the profession, Johnson says.
The problem with the white and female groups, Johnson told Ars, is that the majority of the research that has looked at race, gender, and ethnicity in the fields of psychology has focused on white women.
This makes sense.
It’s not a gender issue, Johnson explains.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or a man, black or white, and your field of expertise is the same.
“There’s so much research that’s not being done on black and brown women, on white and Asian women, or on Native American women, that they’re really underrepresented.”
Black psychologists often feel that they’ve never had the opportunity to apply their skills in the workplace, she says.
“When they look at [black women’s] experiences and they see this, they feel like, ‘Oh, I can do this,'” Johnson says of how she sees the gap.
This isn’t the first time Johnson has faced challenges.
After graduating from college in 2006, Johnson worked in her family’s accounting firm and was able to start her own company.
But after three years, she was laid off.
After receiving unemployment insurance benefits, she moved back home to attend school.
“That was a struggle for me because it’s been three years of no job,” Johnson says about when she first started to look for a new job.
“So I was trying to find jobs.
I was working as a maid, I was doing things like that.
I had to take care of my children.
And it was difficult because I didn’t have a place to live.”
The stress of moving home was also making Johnson depressed, and she decided to get an internship to help pay for her tuition.
But Johnson says the internship was too short and she was unable to get a full-time job.
Johnson, who says that when she did finally get a job, she had to spend over a year applying for jobs.
She eventually landed a full time job at a small accounting firm that paid $15 an hour.
Johnson believes that the lack of jobs was a factor in why she left the firm.
“I was so upset because I was so scared, because I wasn’t really getting paid and I wasn- I was being told, ‘No, you’re not going to get paid because you’re black,’ and ‘No you’re going to be working,'” Johnson recalls.
Johnson was then able to take advantage of her scholarship to attend the University of Mississippi, where she received her bachelor’s degree in psychology.
But when she returned to school, she discovered that she was not accepted into her field of study.
Johnson’s experience is typical for many black women who want to enter the field of psychology.
They feel that there are barriers in the profession and that they can’t get hired for their areas of expertise.
Johnson is one of them, but she says that it’s only because of systemic racism that she can’t have the success that she wanted.
The problems of discrimination in psychology have been well documented over the years, but it’s also been difficult to talk about in the media, she tells Ars.
“It’s very difficult because when you talk about things like this, people get very upset,” Johnson said.
“They think, ‘Why does this have to be said?
Why can’t people just admit that it exists?'”
For Johnson and other black women, the issue of
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