Dinner Conversation

By Mark Hager, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, with Lisa Ann Villarreal, Ph.D., Senior Editor

What would Frida Kahlo, Kamala Harris, Audrey Hepburn, and Margaret Thatcher talk about at a dinner party?

Students in my course Psychology of Women in Organizations study women in twentieth/twenty-first century history and stage conversations between them, seeking to imagine their way into their subjects’ perspectives in order to understand the social and psychological factors that influence women’s experience.

The course arose from the desire to craft a better understanding for students about women’s changing roles in organizations. Mindful of the challenges of a man teaching this content, the importance of allyship and our individual and collective understandings of feminism still spurred me to take on this course when the faculty member who designed it was unavailable. Using her guidelines, we explore topics such as gender stereotypes, communication styles, sexual harassment, leadership, and life/work balance, and give special attention to the specific challenges facing women of color, women entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley women. Approaching this study through the lens of psychology allows us to examine the systemic features of the organization, but also to get at the lived experience of individuals in organizations. Alongside gender studies, we look at studies of abilities and disabilities, of racial and ethnic identity, and how these aspects of the individual intersect.

The project for this course grew out of a desire to let students explore the content in a creative way while still hitting the depth of psychological science that informs our twenty-first century understanding. The concept derives from the intersection of works by two contemporary feminist artists. Judy Chicago is a feminist visual artist, and her installation The Dinner Party (currently housed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum) inspired the visual element of this project. Designed to make visible women’s experience in and contribution to history, the piece gives women a place at a table from which they have historically been excluded.

The work is staged at a massive dinner table, with place-settings that represent each guest. Chicago constructs a narrative from women’s social psychological biographies, using imagery to create metaphorical interpretations of their lives or key moments, as well as their multigenerational connections with the women on whose shoulders they stood.

Like Chicago, the students create place settings for their project representing influential women in history. The students then stage conversations among their chosen guests that both represent these women’s perspectives, historically, but also extrapolate how they might understand their lives today, with twenty-first century theories and language. That borrows from Caryl Churchill’s feminist play Top Girls. Top Girls is a conversation of women in art, fiction, and history at, again, a dinner party; they’re celebrating a woman’s achievement in a man’s world but simultaneously reaching back in time, recognizing the influences on their lives and on our contemporary time.

During the semester the students have been doing these very deep readings of empirical research on the psychology of gender and gender relations published in academic journals. Simultaneously, the students are reading biographies and contemporary published work connected with their chosen guest. Through their projects, the students reveal how these psychological theories intersect with the lives of the women they are studying and how they can help us understand women’s experiences.

Students’ reactions to the course and the project are hands down some of the most positive but also the most eye opening I’ve heard. They discover things they never expected, coming away with a heightened sense of language and a more critical view of their own lived experiences. They tell me, “When you speak about this class, talk about how we changed.” They want everyone to take the class, so they have to examine these issues. They’ll say it’s the best class they ever took and it’s also the hardest work they’ve ever done, and they’re very proud of that.