Shelly Grabe

• M.A., Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of California, Santa Cruz

From its beginnings, feminism has challenged knowledge about women and gender and questioned the methods by which that knowledge is produced. Feminist psychologists are well-positioned to engage in a critical re-examination of the assumptions underlying theory or the constructs employed in the construction of knowledge. Macleod et al. noted that fe...

For the past several decades, coordinated efforts from within the women’s social movement in Perú have led to groundbreaking legislation surrounding gender equity – for example, the National Gender Equality Policy of 2019 and the Gender Parity Law of 2020. These institutionalized policy changes mark milestones on the path to gender equity, certainl...

Across the world, women experience violations to their reproductive health and threats to their educational aspirations that limit their achievement. Reproductive health and education are examples of women's human rights that are connected by systemic gender inequalities that lead millions of women to experience discrimination and stereotyping that...

Despite decades of research on women’s human rights and empowerment across several academic disciplines, inequities between women and men persist at alarming rates across the globe. The current study employs an in-depth exploration of how programs intended for empowering purposes impact individual women’s lives, focusing on the transformation promo...

Globally, limited opportunities for women’s political participation and decision-making reflect a widespread societal problem perpetuated through gender inequities that operate at numerous levels of society. Challenging and ending systemic gender-based power imbalances is critical to understanding the potential for women’s political participation....

Despite growing international interest in policies and practices to enhance women’s status and well-being in the Global South, ideological constraints to structural transformation and increasing opportunities available to women are widespread. There is thus considerable need to examine how ideological processes surrounding women’s status and value...

Despite growing international interest in policies and practices to enhance women’s status and well-being in the Global South, ideological constraints to structural transformation and increasing opportunities available to women are widespread. There is thus considerable need to examine how ideological processes surrounding women’s status and value...

Transnational feminism, in particular, arose during the 1980s out of the interplay between global and local practices influenced by neoliberalism that were denying women’s rights, permitting exploitation, and reproducing subjugation. Therefore, the mobilization and collective identity behind transnational feminism is rooted in a shared criticism of...

The current study focuses on a community-led land and property rights program in two rural provinces in western Kenya. The program was designed to respond to women's property rights violations to reduce violence against women and HIV risks at the community level. Through in-depth interviews with 30 women, we examine the perceived impact that this c...

Despite increasing interest and effort to support women’s empowerment globally, women remain a severely disadvantaged group in nearly every country throughout the globe. In the current study we examine the relationship between women’s participation in financial markets and different indices of empowerment. Questionnaires were administered to three...

Violence against women is a widespread societal problem substantiated and perpetuated through inequities that operate within numerous levels of the society. Challenging and ending gender-based violence therefore requires addressing social structures that perpetuate gendered hierarchies and maintain women’s susceptibility to experiencing violence wo...

In response to a rise of dictatorships, the exacerbation of inequality, and violations of human rights in many Latin American countries, individuals have joined together through the formation of social movements to enact powerful, revolutionary changes in the area of human rights. The Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres (Autonomous Women’s Movement) in...

This study offers a feminist psychology analysis of various aspects of relationship power and control and their relative explanatory contribution to understanding physical, psychological, and sexual violence against women. Findings from structured interviews with 345 women from rural Nicaragua (Mage = 44) overwhelmingly demonstrate that measures of...

In the present study we seek to examine how and why some individuals commit their lives to creating social change in their communities. We specifically explore the lives and experiences of lifetime feminist activists by assessing the role of various social psycholog-ical mechanisms in growing and sustaining commitment to social change in diverse so...

Although it is well-documented that globalization has exacerbated structural factors that contribute to rising levels of gender inequality, social actors from diverse local contexts demonstrate that women are not mere victims, but rather have worked actively to resist oppression and promote women's well-being worldwide. Self-mobilized groups of wom...

Abstract We extend objectification theory research to consider the relationship between self-objectification and attitudes toward an alternative menstrual product in a diverse sample of female undergraduates from the United States (N = 151). We use a survey design to investigate attitudes toward one's menstruation as a potential mechanism that may...

Sexual education plays an essential role in preventing unplanned pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). School-based sexual education programs, in particular, may be well positioned to address social factors that are empirically linked to negative sexual health outcomes, such as traditional social norms surroundin...

Despite the recognized need for structural-level HIV prevention interventions that focus on economic empowerment to reduce women's HIV risks, few science-based programs have focused on securing women's land ownership as a primary or secondary HIV risk reduction strategy. The current study focused on a community-led land and property rights model th...

While access to and control over assets can minimize women’s HIV risk, little is known about the processes through which property rights violations increase the sexual transmission of HIV. The current study focused on two rural areas in Nyanza and Western Province, Kenya where HIV prevalence was high (23.8–33%) and property rights violations were c...

Consistent with the dictum, “the personal is political,” feminist scholars have maintained that gender equity in security, access to education, economic opportunity, and property ownership are central to women’s well-being. Empirical research evaluating this thesis can include nation-level indicators of gender equity, such as the United Nation Deve...

This paper responds to calls from social scientists in the area of globalization and women's empowerment to test a model that investigates both structural and individual components of women's empowerment in the context of globalization. The investigation uses a liberation psychology framework by taking into account the effects of globalization, hum...

Scholars have argued that institutional inequities and control over resources are linked to gender-based violence. However, psychologists have yet to reposition their research questions to examine how structural inequities lead to power imbalances and gender-based norms that perpetuate threats to women's health and safety. This study provides a the...

In response to the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, the present study explored the role of sexually objectifying media—in this case, music television—in a host of psychological consequences among a community sample of adolescents girls (M age = 13 years). Objectification theory posits that the consequen...

Objectification Theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) posits that viewing one's body as an object - i.e., self-objectification - increases depressive symptomatology. Though a handful of studies to date have found self-objectification and depressive symptoms correlated among White American women, few studies have examined whether this finding general...

This meta-analysis examines gender differences in 10 specific domains of self-esteem across 115 studies, including 428 effect sizes and 32,486 individuals. In a mixed-effects analysis, men scored significantly higher than women on physical appearance (d 0.35), athletic (d 0.41), personal self (d 0.28), and self-satisfaction self-esteem (d 0.33). Wo...

Using data from a biracial community sample of adolescents, the present study examined trajectories of alcohol use and abuse over a 15-year period, from adolescence into young adulthood, as well as the extent to which these trajectories were differentially predicted by coping and enhancement motives for alcohol use among the 2 groups. Coping and en...

Research suggests that exposure to mass media depicting the thin-ideal body may be linked to body image disturbance in women. This meta-analysis examined experimental and correlational studies testing the links between media exposure to women's body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal, and eating behaviors and beliefs with a sample o...

Objectified body consciousness (OBC)—the tendency to view one’s body as an object for others to look at and evaluate—is theorized to emerge during sexual maturation as adolescents, particularly adolescent girls, experience sexual objectification. Although OBC generally is discussed in developmental terms, research so far has examined primarily the...

Objectification theory posits that the tendency to view oneself as an object to be looked at and evaluated by others negatively affects girls’, but not boys’, subjective well-being. Although it has been established that women self-objectify more than men, research in this area has been limited to the study of adult college women. The aim in the cur...

The prevailing view in popular culture and the psychological literature is that White women have greater body dissatisfaction than women of color. In this meta-analysis, 6 main effect sizes were obtained for differences among Asian American, Black, Hispanic, and White women with a sample of 98 studies, yielding 222 effect sizes. The average d for t...

Previous research has illustrated the negative psychological consequences of female body objectification. The present study explores how female body objectification may serve as a defense against unconscious existential fears. Drawing from terror management theory, an experiment was designed to test the potential functionality of female body object...