Janet Taylor Spence, PhD, an eminent research psychologist and educator who did pioneering work on gender-related phenomena, was the only person to serve as president of both APA and the Association for Psychological Science.
Spence was president of APA in 1984 – the sixth woman to head the association. One of the founders of APS, she became that organization's first elected president in 1988.
Spence made significant contributions in research for nearly 50 years, first in studies of basic anxiety and later in work on gender-role attitudes and gender identity.
Born Janet Taylor on Aug. 29, 1923, in Toledo, Ohio, she earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and political science from Oberlin College. She did graduate work at Yale University and earned her master's and doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1949. As part of her doctoral dissertation she created the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, a method for relating anxiety to performance that has been used by generations of researchers to assess individual anxiety levels.
In 1949, she was hired as an instructor in the psychology department of Northwestern University, the first woman ever to be hired in that department. Her hiring was initially considered to be a dubious experiment by some in the department, but she established herself as a valuable teacher of statistics and advisor to graduate students. She was promoted to assistant professor in 1951 and to associate professor in 1956.
In 1959, she married Kenneth Spence, under whose supervision she had earned her doctorate, and in 1960 she moved back to Iowa. Unable to get a position at the university because of prevailing nepotism policies, Janet Spence found a position as a research psychologist at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Iowa City. There, she applied her interest in issues of motivation and anxiety to the study of schizophrenics vs. non-schizophrenics.
In 1964, the Spences moved to Austin, Texas, where Kenneth had a position in the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin, while Janet Spence was once again shunted to an alternative site because of nepotism policies. Her first position was as a research scientist at the Austin State School, an institution for mentally disabled children. Subsequently, she was offered a position in the educational psychology department at the university and used that position to expand her interests to include child development.
When Kenneth died in 1967, Janet Spence at last was offered a position in the UT psychology department, not only as a full faculty member but as chair of the department. In 1979, she was named the Ashbel Smith professor of psychology and educational psychology, which at that time made her the only named professor in the department.
In the 1970s, Spence shifted her research focus to gender-related phenomena, a topic that would engage her interest for the rest of her academic life. In a highly productive collaboration with the late Robert Helmreich, Spence developed several indices for measuring gender-related characteristics and attitudes, including the "Attitudes toward Women Scale" and the "Personal Attributes Questionnaire,” both of which continue to be used and referenced by contemporary investigators. Their 1978 book, Masculinity and Femininity: Their Psychological Dimensions, Correlates and Antecedents , moved the study of gender into the mainstream of psychological research, according to the Psychology Encyclopedia.
Beyond her numerous publications, Spence was also a major contributor to the editorial processes of psychology. From 1973 to 1979, she was editor of Contemporary Psychology. She also was editor of the Annual Review of Psychology . In addition to her presidencies of APA and APS, Spence served as chair of the psychology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1984) and was a member of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society (1978-83). She was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received honorary degrees from Oberlin College, The Ohio State University and the University of Toledo.
Spence retired from the University of Texas in 1997 and moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She died at age 91 on March 16, 2015.