Medical News Today has interviewed Prof. Cheryl Giscombé, an expert on stress-related health disparities among African Americans, about a source of pressure that many African American women experience: the obligation to project an image of strength or that of fulfilling a ‘superwoman’ role.
In 2010, Prof. Cheryl Giscombé, Ph.D., published a paper entitled Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health in the journal Qualitative Health Research. In it, she explained:
“Researchers have suggested that health disparities in African American women, including adverse birth outcomes, lupus, obesity, and untreated depression, can be explained by stress and coping. The Strong Black Woman/Superwoman role has been highlighted as a phenomenon influencing African American women’s experiences and reports of stress.”
MNT reached out to Prof. Giscombé — who is the Melissa and Harry LeVine Family Professor of Quality of Life, Health Promotion and Wellness at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — in an attempt to find out more about how this role affects Black women.
We spoke to Prof. Giscombé — who is also a social and health psychologist and a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner — about her past and current research, and how she developed the superwoman schema.
We also talked about how the superwoman role affects the mental (and physical) health of African American women, whether there are any benefits to the role, and what are some interventions that could help offset its adverse effects — both on an individual and a societal level.
We have lightly edited the interview for clarity.
MNT: Could you kindly define the notion of the superwoman schema for our readers and tell us a bit about what prompted you to research it?
Prof. Giscombé: Yes, thank you for asking. So, the superwoman schema is a conceptual framework that I developed based on research with African-American women across various age groups and educational backgrounds to understand better how to conceptualize stress and coping in African American women.
I have been interested in the effects of stress on health behaviors and health outcomes for a number of years, since I was an undergraduate in college, and probably before.
I was quite concerned when I saw that there seemed to be inadequate measures, inadequate ways to evaluate stress that were often void of the gender and/or race-specific nuances that may influence how African American women experience and cope with stress.
So, I became interested in this — really, I became interested in emotional suppression first. So, if women felt like they could not express their emotions, how might that impact their health? And then I became interested in this concept of strength — if they feel obligated to present an image of strength.
So, through qualitative research with African American women, the superwoman schema conceptual framework was developed, and we identified [its] five characteristics:
- a perceived obligation to present an image of strength
- a perceived obligation to suppress emotions
- a perceived obligation to resist help or to resist being vulnerable to others […]
- [a] motivation to succeed despite limited resources
- [p]rioritization of caregiving
Basically, prioritization of caregiving is a role of caregiving that really is the prioritization of caregiving over self-care, that’s what it ends up being, and that’s how the women describe it.
The superwoman schema is a conceptual framework. […] When I talked to people, they were generally talking about the characteristics that I described. But, from the research, we also identified antecedents and motivations for it — because it’s not like women just woke up one day and decided, “I’m going to feel obligated to do these things.”
They talked about historical factors, societal factors, lessons from their foremothers, how they saw their moms cope, their grandmothers cope and deal with stress.
They talked about how showing your emotions could be seen as a sign of weakness and make you more vulnerable, how asking for help could make you be disappointed. Because, first of all, when we ask for help, people may then want you to do a favor for them and not a good favor — you know how people do take advantage of you if you let them help you?
And not only that, [but also] if you allowed people to help you, women felt that it was inefficient, often because they could probably do a better and quicker job themselves, and so they defaulted to taking care of things on their own versus asking for help.
So, there were a number of reasons [for taking on the superwoman role], including historical oppression, gender- and race-related oppression and abuse. Many of the [women] talked about a history of experiencing verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.)
And the themes were similar across age groups. We interviewed women in college; we interviewed women with no college and some who hadn’t even completed a high-school education. We interviewed women who had completed college and women who had terminal degrees (law degrees, Ph.D. degrees) and young adult women from age 18 [to women in their 60s].
So it was a broad range, yet the themes were very similar across ages and educational backgrounds.
MNT: Could you tell us more about the relationship with racial discrimination and historical racism and how they contributed to the superwoman role and the perceived pressures of this role?
Prof. Giscombé: In particular, some women talked about not wanting to be perceived as “low on the totem pole.” That’s a quote from a group of women, and particularly the women from what we call a lower SES [socioeconomic status].
And [they spoke about] trying to dispel stereotypes about Black women by, what one might consider over-performing, so making sure you’re taking care of your family, your community.
And that’s the other thing. These women weren’t just discussing these characteristics in response to their own stressors, but they were responding to the stressors facing their community, their children, the Black males.
And they felt that there was some obligation and responsibility to perform [or behave] in these ways or to believe these things and then act upon them based on what they saw going on in their community — their relationships with men, protecting their children, [and} being the “backbone” of the African American community. So they saw this as part of their role.
I call it the superwoman schema because of the psychological and cognitive components of this [phenomenon], where this may be a way of thinking that has grown over time. It may be subconscious — although, of course, talking about it brought it to women’s consciousness.
But when I interviewed women, [it was interesting to see] how they talked about it.
They became enlightened as they talked about it. So, I remember one of the participants talking about her grandmother and what she remembered seeing her grandmother do and not do […], work all day and do things on her own.
And she talked about how yet [she] never saw her cry, and the more she talked, the more she recognized “Wow, she did model this for me, and maybe unintentionally I picked it up! I never saw her cry, yet she ended up having heart disease, and she had diabetes […].”
So, women came to those realizations as they talked about their experiences and their foremothers in particular.
So, racism directly [contributed to these pressures], but also the effects of racism on society, on Black society. And what that causes people to have to do in their daily lives to survive and thrive. So, direct racism but also indirect [racism contributed to creating the superwoman role].
MNT: In some of our previous articles, we often came across the so-called ‘spillover effects’ of experiencing racism, whether it’s via police brutality or interpersonal discrimination or systemic discrimination. Could this pressure to overperform and place caretaking duties first be an example of one such spillover effect, for example, in situations where young Black males are at the receiving end of police violence, and so on?
Prof. Giscombé: Yes, definitely. So, either direct or vicarious experiences [of racism] and also trying to fill in the gaps