Section 2 - Developmental Perspectives of the International Psychology of Women

Ivy Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a gender development psychologist focusing on the expression of gender and its development at the intersection of socialization, cognition, and biology. She studies gender and sexuality across the life span. Her expertise includes gender-typed play, gender differences and similarities, sex segregation, gender socialization, gender variance, gender stereotypes, and sexual orientation. She is interested in bridging the gap between the West and other cultures in research on the psychology of gender. Wong was born in Mainland China, and moved to Hong Kong when she was 6. She was an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong. In her third year she obtained a scholarship to spend a full year at Cambridge University. Then she stayed on for an MPhil and PhD at Cambridge where she spent over five years. Wong is a full-blood Teochew, an ethnic Han group from southeastern China. She is fond of the Teochew dialect and traditions that her family is still able to keep.

Doug P. VanderLaan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and a Collaborator Scientist in Child and Youth Psychiatry at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. He has conducted community-based and clinical research on the development of gender expression as well as cross-cultural field studies on third gender individuals and sexual orientation in Samoa and Thailand. His other cross-cultural work on these topics has included collaborations with researchers in the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, mainland China, and Hong Kong. VanderLaan was born in Canada in the Central/Toronto area. He attended college and graduate school in western Canada. VanderLaan has spent long periods of time in Japan, Samoa, and Thailand. He is of Sicilian and Dutch heritage.

Yang Qu is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He received a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Qu takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and neuroscience to examine how sociocultural contexts shape adolescent development. He studies adolescents from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds using a variety of methodological approaches, including longitudinal and experimental designs along with survey, observational, and biological (e.g., neuroimaging with fMRI) assessments. Qu was born in Beijing, went to college in Shanghai, and moved to the USA for graduate school.

Shiyu Zhang is a PhD student at the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She recently graduated with an MA in social science (sociology focus) at the University of Chicago. She also has an MA in Migration, Ethnic Relations, and Multiculturalism from Utrecht University, an MSc in Data Science from Tilburg University, and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her methodological research interest is in combining survey data and novel forms of data in answering social science questions; her substantive research interest is in family relations between parents and adolescents. She has published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and the Journal of Research in Personality.

Sylvia Chanda Kalindi is an Instructor in the Faculty of Education at the Mount Saint Vincent University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Kalindi was born and raised in Zambia, where she attended college She obtained her master’s degree from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and her PhD degree in Developmental Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has worked in Zambia, Hong Kong, and Canada. Her research interests include language and literacy development, and parental support and literacy development, as well as the use of computer intervention strategies to enhance reading development across languages. Sylvia has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly and Frontiers in Psychology and contributed to volumes such as The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences and The International Handbook of Early Childhood.

Beiming Yang is a PhD candidate in the Human Development and Social Policy program in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He received BA and MSc degrees in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cultural differences in adolescents’ motivation, emotion, and decision making, as well as the role of parents in these processes. Yang was born in China and moved to the USA for the last year of high school when he was 16 years old.

Qian Wang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wang was born in Chongqing, China and went to Peking University for her undergraduate studies. She then received her PhD degree in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her major research interests include parenting, social and personality development, and cultural influences on socialization and human development. She has published in journals such as Child Development and the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and contributed to volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Psychology and The Handbook of Parenting. Wang identifies herself as ethnically and nationally Chinese, while intellectually “a global citizen.”

This chapter is based on research supported by the South African Research Chairs initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa, grant number 87582.

Catriona Ida Macleod is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and SARChI Chair of the Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction research programme at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her major scholastic contributions have been in two main areas: sexual and reproductive health, and feminist theory in psychology. She has written extensively in national and international journals in relation to teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexuality education, pregnancy support, feminist psychology, and postcolonialist and poststructural theory. She is author of the multi-award winning book “Adolescence”, pregnancy and abortion: Constructing a threat of degeneration (2011), co-author (with Tracy Morison) of the book Men’s pathways to parenthood: Silence and heterosexual gendered norms (2015) and lead editor of the Palgrave handbook of ethics in critical research (2018). She is editor-in-chief of the international journal Feminism & Psychology. She is vice-chairperson of the Sexual and Reproductive Justice Coalition Board. Macleod was born and raised in South Africa. She attended what was then University of Natal and the University of Cape Town. She has worked extensively throughout South Africa.

Tracy Morison is a Social and Health Psychology lecturer in the School of Psychology at Massey University (New Zealand) and an Honorary Research Associate in the Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction research programme at Rhodes University (South Africa). Morison’s research focus falls within the broad area of sexual and reproductive health, with a particular interest in reproductive “choice,” stigma, and marginalized identities. She works with critical feminist theories and qualitative methodologies. She is the co-author (with Catriona Mcleod) of Men’s pathways to parenthood: Silence and heterosexual gendered norms (2015) and lead editor of Queer kinship: South African perspectives on the sexual politics of family-making and belonging (2019). She is a co-editor of the International Society for Critical Health Psychology weblog. Morison was born and grew up in South Africa. She studied at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. She moved to New Zealand in 2016 to take up a post at Massey University, where she now teaches courses in social psychology and health psychology. She is a feminist health psychologist.