Director of training for the Emory Counseling Center, Epps said she was able to "tag along" on the two-week trip to Kenya because, "I have a good friend on the faculty at a university in Virginia who was going on a fellowship to Kenya with a group of faculty from around the country," Epps said. "I wanted to go to Africa, not only because I had never been and wanted to see it, but also to do some groundwork for some possible research on cross-cultural issues."
In an article for the fall issue of Women's News & Narratives, the Emory Women's Center newsletter, Epps wrote that struggles for personal and political empowerment are clearly shared by Kenyan and American women. "Women have limited social and political power in Kenya at this point," She wrote, "and like American women, Kenyan women and their children face disproportionate economic disadvantage. However, I was impressed by the personal power of many of the women I met there, despite legislative controls, financial constraints and cultural beliefs that repress women's independence and development."
In many ways, Epps explained, the lives of Kenyan women today closely resemble the lives of American women in the 1950s in terms of sexism. Date rape and spousal abuse are persistent problems in Kenya, but police rarely take decisive action in such cases. "Police are much less likely to intervene there than they are here," Epps said. Only recently have laws been passed here that make it incumbent upon police to make arrests in domestic violence cases. "It used to be that they could go and kind of decide what to do, and the abused person had to press charges before the other person could be arrested," she said. "That is a recent change here, and there hasn't been the same kind of commitment in Kenya to not seeing abuse as the spouse's right."
Epps' doctoral dissertation examined "The Effects of Gender on Decoding Accuracy for Deceptive and Non-deceptive Expectancy-based Vocal Nonverbal Cues." In her days as a graduate student, Epps wrote a comprehensive examination paper on sex differences in spatial skills. She also has presented papers on "Racism, Sexism and Stress" and "Enhancing Self Esteem."
Self esteem problems in women of all ages, but in adolescent girls in particular, have long been observed in American culture. After speaking with the dean of students at the University of Nairobi, who is also a psychologist, Epps became aware of a pattern of self esteem problems shared by adolescent girls in both Kenya and the United States.
The psychologist in Nairobi told Epps that "Kenyan girls excel in elementary and high school, and there are more girls in school at that point. Then in college, the numbers reverse so that by the junior or senior year in college, there are four times as many males as females enrolled. She told me that there are a number of reasons why this happens. Families that can only send one child to college usually send a male over a female. Often women start families, both planned and unplanned. And there is the idea that women don't necessarily need that kind of education."
Epps said some recent writing has examined the phenomenon of American girls who have been very self confident and performed well in school beginning to have self doubts once they reach puberty. "They begin to emphasize attractiveness and ladylikeness over intelligence and sports and other things they used to pride themselves on," Epps said. "That pattern is present in both Kenyan and American cultures, and it isn't clear how that's getting transmitted [to adolescent girls]."
The research on changing attitudes in adolescent girls could play a significant role in a research project Epps would like to conduct with the psychologist at the University of Nairobi. She hopes to compare how factors such as parenting, socioeconomic status and nationality affect self esteem in populations of women of African descent.
The work could have international implications, Epps believes; if patterns in U.S. culture are revealed that are adversely affecting adolescent girls, perhaps those mistakes can be avoided in Kenya and other nations, Epps said.
--Dan Treadaway