This month’s issue features an article that highlights the many social and structural barriers that hinder having a more diverse psychology pipeline. From ensuring the quality of high school psychology courses to encouraging more diverse graduate school applicants, there is clearly no single way to address this issue.
Meaningfully diversifying the psychology pipeline requires us to employ multiple strategies at multiple levels. Here are a few examples of what that could look like:
- At the individual level, each of us can take steps to support broader diversity in the field. One of the most powerful things that we can do is serve as a mentor to people at earlier stages in their careers. I was fortunate to have many great mentors from various cultural backgrounds who were critical to my development as a psychologist. Regardless of your own background, you can be intentional about mentoring someone who helps to diversify our field.
- At the institutional level, we can shape the organizations in which we work—from academia to health care—to better promote demographic and viewpoint diversity. For instance, many of us can create internships in community health clinics or academic research centers that would expose psychology students to new areas of the field. Similarly, we can establish scholarships not only within academic settings, but with other entities like philanthropic foundations, places of worship, or community service organizations.
- As a field, we can be more intentional about fostering and maintaining a diverse discipline and profession. In doing so, it is important to understand diversity as not just an important value but as critical to the advancement of psychology. Our science improves when we have researchers with diverse viewpoints, and our practice is more effective when those delivering services reflect the groups and organizations we are serving. In the same way that science undergirds all that we do and is critical to the viability of our field, we must meaningfully infuse diversity in our work, and diversity must also serve as a lens through which we advocate and view our professional roles.
Each of us can play a role in the creation of tomorrow’s rigorous and diverse psychology profession and discipline. We can do so by influencing the institutions and systems in which we work, advocating within our field, and being personally involved in the lives of students and early career psychologists from diverse backgrounds.
