The Journey To Complete My Ph.D.
About a year ago, I walked in the Oregon State University 2016 commencement ceremony marking the end of a journey to complete my Ph.D.. I later stood in front of a committee to defend my dissertation entitled “Gender Biases in Counselor Supervisor Evaluations of Counselors”. I am incredibly grateful to have been able to work full time and also complete a doctoral degree and it certainly wasn’t easy. Evoke was a tremendous support to me throughout the process, as was my love for the work I do with the girls in the wilderness. The idea to look at gender biases was first born out of my work with adolescent girls, as I have heard countless stories of perceptions of being treated unfairly or expectations being different for them than for their teenage boy counterparts – not to mention my own experiences in the world as a cisgender female. For those that may not know what the term “cisgender” means, it is a gender identity term that means someone whose gender identity matched with their sex assigned at birth. After my initial research exploring the study of gender and reading hundreds of studies on gender discrimination and bias, I discovered there were little to no empirical studies looking at transgender discrimination in counselor supervision and education. Based on this discovery of the glaring gap in the existing research and on my own personal convictions regarding the importance of affirmation, inclusion, and equality my research project was born. Below are the opening paragraphs from the manuscript (Hadeed & Ng, 2017, p. 2):