Inspiration and guidance from women mentors have helped to move Pamela Taylor toward achieving her life's goal: becoming a PhD in social psychology, a goal she will achieve in April.

When Pamela was a little girl growing up in New York City, her mother had a friend with a PhD in education. Feeling a child's squeamishness about blood and illness, Taylor was delighted at the potential this suggested: "I saw that I could be a doctor without being a medical doctor," she says. "Just being exposed to that possibility at an early age made a big difference."

Pamela's mother, returning to college at the same time her daughter was in high school, stoked the young woman's curiosity with anecdotes about research on psychology applied to business. When Pamela got to Johnson C. Smith Universitv in Charlotte, North Carolina, psychologist Dr. Ruth Green was looking for a research assistant. Pamela's determination to get a PhD won her the spot. She graduated as class valedictorian.

And Pamela arrived at UCLA with a National Science Foundation fellowship just as a project on how features of communities affect behaviors and attitudes involving marriage and family was just getting under way. The project, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, is directed by M. Belinda Tucker, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, in collaboration with Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Professor of Anthropology, Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate Division.

From August to December 1995, telephone interviews were conducted with residents of 21 cities selected to differ on certain characteristics, including population makeup, economic conditions, and geographical location. Since then, Pamela has been helping to organize and analyze the treasure trove of information.

Dr. Tucker describes Pamela as "an essential part of our research program," largely responsible for the fact that the data are being quickly turned into publications and presentations, for example, a symposium at a recent meeting of the American Psychological Association. "While we're thrilled that she's finishing her dissertation so quickly," Dr. Tucker says, "we're going to miss her. Her absence is going to be felt."

Just three years after her arrival at UCLA, Pamela is now well into a dissertation year fellowship from the Center for African American Studies. Her research at UCLA has been done at the intersection of race and gender, of psychology's interest in behavior and attitudes with sociology's interest in the social structure.

Her master's thesis looked at the relationship between racial identification, gender identification, and activism among African American women. During the 1970s, black women sometimes felt pressured to choose between support of the Civil Rights Movement or feminism. Taylor found that the women themselves didn't want to choose. Their identification with race and gender issues tended to be equally strong, and so was their willingness to be activists on behalf of those issues.

Using the new data set, Pamela's dissertation will look at the relationship between people's beliefs about appropriate gender-role attitudes and their desire for marriage. So far, she has found that African American men and women still believe in traditional roles: men as the breadwinners and heads of household, women as the caregivers for children. But they also believe that women should go out to work to support a family. Some single African American women are "stepping back and saying, wait a minute, I can't do it all," Taylor says.

She also found that people had two ways of looking at the provider role: While they believe that "both people should go out and earn money, they see it as the man's responsibility." Thus, when women hold jobs, "their working is seen as help."

Pamela's long-term interest is in women and their careers, how work affects choices about getting married and having children, and how those family choices affect careers. These are concerns of considerable personal interest to a woman of marriageable age.

Unmarried but in a committed relationship likely to result in marriage, Taylor says the personal relevance of her research makes her work more interesting. "It makes the challenge of finding something out more intense," she says, "when you need to know it for yourself."

Published in Winter 1998, Graduate Quarterly