Edwin A. Fleishman Award Psychology

2021 Awardee

Hannah Markell-Goldstein

Hannah Markell-Goldstein, PhD earned her PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at George Mason University, where she focused on advanced methodological techniques and diversity/discrimination among women and people of color in the workplace. She worked as a Business Manager on the People Strategy & Analytics team at Capital One, where she focused on Enterprise Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging Analytics. She also worked at Meta (Facebook) as a Functional Business Analytics Partner in Diversity Recruiting Analytics. Hannah is now the Lead for Research & Insights in People Analytics at Dropbox. Her applied work focuses on achieving an organization’s DEI initiatives, improving prediction of attrition, and developing measures of key metrics such as quality of hire and belonging.

Dissertation:

WORK, MOTHERHOOD, AND BREASTFEEDING—OH MY! SHAME AND GUILT AS CONDUITS OF THE EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED SELF-DISCREPANCIES ON KEY WORK AND BREASTFEEDING OUTCOMES

New mothers who breastfeed continue to face challenges upon their return to the workplace. My dissertation explores the intrapersonal experiences of women managing working full-time outside the home while breastfeeding. Using an experience sampling-type methodology I integrate my findings into a framework derived from research on self-conscious emotions, and self-discrepancy theory. Participants were surveyed weekly for 5 weeks upon their return to work post-maternity leave. Results indicated that while each of the three categories of self-discrepancy (motherhood, work and breastfeeding) significantly predicted state-guilt, only motherhood-focused self-discrepancy (SD) significantly predicted state-shame. Furthermore, whereas both shame and guilt predicted intent to quit breastfeeding, intent to quit job, and life-satisfaction, only guilt served to mediate the relationships between SDs and these outcomes. These findings provide insight into the nature of shame and guilt and how both emotions may operate in the context of managing working while breastfeeding.