What if women had been invited to the party when psychology was first started? That’s the idea that races through my mind, drives my writing, has changed my therapy, and even changed my self-views.
My perspective shifted when I read The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams*. It’s a historical fiction based on the compilation of the first Oxford English Dictionary. Those volumes became the seminal publication of the English language; the printed authority on the words we speak. The lexicographers worked for 50-years to publish that first groundbreaking edition.
They were all men.
Scholars agreed on the word definitions.
Williams’ book prompted readers to explore how gender and class shape how we define, write, and speak our words (in English anyway).
I could not stop thinking about that.
I have devoted decades to psychology, and yet its bias, my bias, was hiding in plain sight, contained in the words I agreed to use. I kept wondering about the definitions of words and how our science, even our understanding of humanity, might be different if women, minorities, and other voices had a say on words and definitions.
Joseph Henrich has written at length on psychology’s WEIRDness (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic)*. What changed for me was seeing this bias inside a word, inside its definition. It was revelatory to wonder how every aspect of psychology has been built on a foundation of words.
I acknowledge that marginalised people have lived this bias and might see all this as old news.
And now we can wonder as AI is gathering it all up and spitting it back out at us. Bias within bias. *
This wondering has changed my therapy, my writing, and my work.
It's a primary reason for the workshop Rikke Kjelgaard and I are delivering in September.
Our workshop isn't about excluding men, but about giving women a space to explore how our lives have been shaped by our language, our cultures, our societies. When we see, we change.
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In part one, we'll explore those patterns built across your life.
In part two, we'll help you choose your voice and take steps into the life you choose
Come join us and learn how to take up your own space.
* Just $249 USD if you register before September 1st *
* Great value, includes both workshops *
* Live online - Recording available *
* September 11 and 25 * 8:00am CEST, 16:00 AEST *
* 4 hours of CPD delivered by clinical psychologists *
* Williams, P. (2020). The Dictionary of Lost Words. Affirm Press.
* Henrich, J. (2020). The weirdest people in the world. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
* This was not written by AI. LLMs are a useful servant, but not a voice for humanity.
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