EDI roles for psychologists are expanding

[This article is part of the 2023 Trends Report]

After the social justice protests of 2020, many universities, businesses, and nonprofits were shaken out of a certain complacency around equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

This shift in focus has led to the spread and deepening of EDI roles—roles that psychologists are increasingly stepping into. In fact, many have been doing the work for years, but are finding that the opportunities have expanded around them.

“Two years ago, the short-term requests diminished, and the longer-term requests ramped up,” said Kumea Shorter-Gooden, PhD, a clinical/community psychologist who runs a Washington, D.C.–based EDI consulting business. “I experienced a fivefold increase in requests for services.”

Though a psychology background is not a requirement for doing EDI work, psychologists are well trained in the sorts of skills that are crucial, from doing assessments to synthesizing data to facilitating tough conversations. As organizations look for far more comprehensive EDI overhauls than they have in the past, these skills are even more important.

EDI, sometimes abbreviated DEI or expanded into DEIB (which adds “belonging” to the list of priorities) or DEAI (which highlights “accessibility”), is not a new field. Nor is it unusual to have psychologists taking the lead. Robert Sellers, PhD, a social psychologist who served as the chief diversity officer at the University of Michigan until August 2022, stepped into the university-wide role after chairing the psychology department, where he spent years focusing on recruiting psychologists from underrepresented backgrounds to the field. Anita Davis, PhD, a clinical/community psychologist and the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Trinity College in Connecticut, had been doing EDI work for many years without “diversity” in her title. She never wanted a role with a diversity title, she said, feeling it might limit the breadth and impact of the work. “But I realized with the formalization of these titles comes the ability to institutionalize the work, build infrastructure, and advocate for resources,” she said.

What has changed, psychologists working in equity roles say, is the depth and breadth of EDI work. Job posting statistics suggest that roles exclusively centered on EDI have proliferated: According to statistics from the job listing site Indeed, EDI job openings rose from 140 jobs per million to 219 jobs per million between September 2019 and September 2020, a 56.3% increase. The work is found in both corporate settings and academia (Indeed Career Guide, 2022opens in new window).

“Certainly after 2020, the call-in and call-out of addressing issues of anti-Black racism really spurred a lot of universities to take a second look at their EDI efforts and say, ‘How are our efforts really changing the conditions that Black students find themselves in?’” said psychologist Anneliese Singh, PhD, the chief diversity officer at Tulane University.

Some universities have also been moving toward different models of EDI planning. For instance, instead of handing down goals from a central administrative committee, the University of Michigan developed its 5-year EDI planopens in new window by flipping the process, asking every administrative unit to create a personalized plan, yielding 2,800 separate action items, Sellers said. The university also developed a centralized plan to tackle projects that could be handled at only the university level, such as training. At the time, he said, this was an unusual tack, but doing the planning from the bottom up helped ensure the process was more relevant to everyone and gave individual departments a greater sense of responsibility over the outcomes, Sellers said.

“More and more universities are now doing a more distributed approach to planning,” he said. “But I would say we were amongst the first.”

Psychologists are also increasingly finding work in new corners. Yuma Tomes, PhD, an educational psychologist, spent 20 years working his way up the academic administration ladder before joining The Phillips Collectionopens in new window, an art museum in Washington, D.C., as its chair of DEAI. He now does internal workshops and communications, consults with the museum board about issues of diversity, and oversees the museum’s internship and fellowship programs to ensure participants come from a variety of backgrounds.

“I didn’t know a Renoir from a Rembrandt, but I knew that I understood DEAI work,” Tomes said. It is unusual for a museum to have a full-time position devoted to this work, he said, though some integrate EDI with part-time staff or use outside consultants. It is an area to watch for more growth, he said.

The way Tomes’s role is positioned within the organization also represents a positive trend for effective EDI work. Instead of working in an isolated team tasked with its own agenda, his work is integrated into the overall structure. “DEAI is interconnected to every single department that we have,” he said. “We influence finance, we influence curation, we influence conservation, we influence HR, we influence the director’s office. It is imperative for DEAI work to be carried throughout every department to become institutionalized and systemic.”

For Amber Hewitt, PhD, the path to EDI work wound from counseling psychology to an APA Congressional Fellowship to health advocacy to the government of the District of Columbia, where she was appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser to the brand-new role of chief equity officer in 2021. Counseling psychology emphasizes how humans interact with systems, Hewitt said, and government is one of those systems. Much of Hewitt’s work revolves around involving communities in decisions about policy, including running public engagement forums to get residents’ input on Washington, D.C.’s first-ever racial equity action plan.

Political change can affect the EDI field directly. Kizzy Parks, PhD, an industrial/organizational psychologist and the head of K. Parks Consulting in Florida, consults mostly for federal government agencies. In the federal government, presidential administrations have their own priorities that set the tone for the kind of services consultants need to provide, Parks said. Shifts happen with every election, but the change from the Trump administration to the Biden administration was particularly stark, she noted. In September 2020, then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning diversity training deemed divisive. During this time, Parks said, most of the work her company did for the federal government focused on soft skills training, leadership training, or meeting the requirements of a certain law or regulation. “The actual requests for diversity and inclusion training were quite low or nonexistent,” she said.

The Biden administration reversed that executive order and made diversity and equity a priority. The result, Parks said, has been a bevy of requests ranging from analytics to training. The work also requires having one’s finger on the pulse of federal regulations. For instance, Parks said, in August 2022, NASA held its first vendor equity forum geared toward encouraging LGBTQ+-owned businesses to work with the federal agency. This move might indicate that in the future, the federal government will require a certain proportion of contractors to hold this certification, just as the government currently sets aside work for women-owned and veteran-owned businesses.

“It opens up more options as far as the type of work to go after as well as the type of companies to partner with,” Parks said.

A psychology background can be a boon for EDI work, which requires both people skills and analytical skills. “There are a lot of transferable skills that psychologists have in our training,” Hewitt said.

These include critical thinking, an understanding of human behavior and cognition, and qualitative research training, Hewitt said, the latter of which is helpful when synthesizing themes from public engagement forums. Psychologists also have valuable training in qualitative and quantitative research methods, from developing assessments to collecting data to analyzing and interpreting that data, Shorter-Gooden said. On the soft skills side, EDI work often involves facilitating groups, managing conflict, and making space for tough conversations, Shorter-Gooden said—all skills that many clinical and community psychologists have spent years cultivating.

The day-to-day of an EDI job depends on the organization. An academic chief diversity officer may work to create big-picture programs and initiatives, consulting with upper administration as well as departments across the university. EDI at a college or university is highly collaborative, Davis said. Recruiting diverse talent requires working with human resources, and inclusive housing goals require close partnerships with residential life staff, for example. This type of collaboration has increased as academia begins to view EDI more comprehensively, Davis said. “We’ve moved from focusing predominantly on students, to students and faculty, to now being mindful of our staff,” she said. “All members of our community and their experiences matter.”

Consulting for nonprofits can involve assessments and interventions similar to those in academia, said Shorter-Gooden, who has worked in both spheres. But nonprofits are often smaller and more nimble than large universities, so change sometimes comes faster.

Psychologists, by virtue of their backgrounds, can bring a particular flavor of mental health awareness to EDI work. Tomes helps curators at The Phillips Collection consider how art that deals with challenging topics might affect museum visitors.

Even as EDI work becomes more prevalent, people in the field are coping with politicized backlash. The past couple of years have brought increased attention to issues of equity and diversity, Sellers said, and often in extremely polarizing ways. This can be stressful for people doing the work. “Our DEI leads are often on the front lines,” he said.

One oft-repeated concern among psychologists in EDI is that political forces might stifle their efforts. Many states are increasingly pushing back against education around diversity and inclusion. Most of these efforts are focused on K–12 public education, but some attempts reach beyond public schools. In Virginia, for example, Governor Glenn Youngkin excised the word “equity” from the state’s education system and from state offices, changing the title of the state’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer to chief diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer. In Florida, the “Stop Woke Act” banned workplace trainings that teach that individuals are inherently racist or sexist, even unconsciously, or that might cause an individual to feel guilt for historical wrongdoings. (In August 2022, a Florida judge blocked the act as a violation of the First Amendment following a lawsuit from three private businesses. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a separate suit on First Amendment and academic freedom grounds.)

“When I began my training in the ’80s and all the way up to now, I had never seen an all-out assault on something that was clearly evidence-based and would benefit the country as what has been happening,” said Kim Nickerson, PhD, a clinical psychologist and the assistant dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Maryland.

This kind of pushback is frustrating for those doing EDI work and could slow the expansion of EDI into new areas, Tomes said. “I feel that it is promising that we will see more chief diversity officers or similar positions in museums,” he said. “But I also have some bit of concern regarding the efforts states are making to limit the concerns that come into DEI work.”

People working in EDI also experience individual pushback. Change is difficult, Shorter-Gooden said; even those who hire an EDI consultant may balk at having the status quo challenged. “Turnover is high,” Nickerson agreed. “At a mid- and upper-administrative level it’s very difficult for people to do the things that they see need to be done without there being some grumbling or negative repercussions.”

A psychology background is helpful for understanding these dynamics and coping with them, Sellers said. At the University of Michigan, he worked to ensure DEI leads had social support and opportunities for well-being and attempted to set realistic expectations for change.

“Making sure that people have a cognitive frame for understanding what change looks like and what to expect is important,” Sellers said. “Sometimes increased resistance is the best indicator of change.”

Though the in-groups and out-groups may shift, an understanding of human behavior and group dynamics suggests EDI work will always be necessary, Parks said. And psychologists doing the work say the rewards are worth the stressors. In clinical work, it is sometimes difficult to see individual patients struggle against a world that marginalizes them and contributes to their problems, Shorter-Gooden said.

“How do we help individuals navigate in a complicated world where oppression exists?” she said. “Let’s not just be downstream fishing out people who’ve been pushed into the water. Let’s go upstream, see what’s going on, and change those conditions.”