Janet Shibley Hyde was many things during her multidecade career—a respected teacher in the Departments of Psychology and Gender and Women’s Studies, a trailblazing researcher who redefined our understanding of gender differences--but she was never a commencement speaker. If she had been, she would have offered students the same advice by which she lived herself.
Don’t pursue a happy life, pursue a satisfying one.
“The person who spends their life pursuing happiness is doomed not to find it,” says Hyde. “Instead, seek meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Those are the two things that make life worthwhile.”
Hyde, who retired last semester after spending the bulk of her career—36 years in total-- teaching at UW-Madison, had both things in abundance. She chaired both of her departments (psychology from 1998-2001, gender and women’s studies from 2020-21) and enjoyed a front-row seat as her fields of study transformed and expanded, often as a result of the research she was conducting.
Judith Houck, the current chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, describes her colleague and friend as “influential,” a researcher whose work impacted everything from gender-segregated education and parental leave to our understanding of women and depression.
When Hyde first began studying psychology in the 1970s—in a mouse behavior lab at Oberlin College–women researchers were scarce, and women, as a group, were hardly being studied. At the time, she says, only 20 percent of PhDs in psychology were being granted to women. Today, that number has grown to more than 50 percent.
“Now, gender is fully recognized as an important topic,” says Hyde. “We are now talking about transgender people and how to integrate them into psychological research. It’s been such a seismic shift, but it happened so gradually that I never felt like I fell off a cliff.”
Hyde obtained her PhD in 1972, the same year the massive second wave of the women’s movement began to crest. The timing was both critical and fortuitous. Hyde began devouring what literature she could find on the psychology of women and gender and decided to teach a class on the former as a new assistant professor at Bowling Green State University.
“I think I was at the right place at the right time, because I was able to get in on the ground floor of this new thing that became psychology of women and gender,” she says. “Had I come along 10 or 15 years later, I couldn't have had as much impact as I did.”
Hyde had been blessed with a quantitative brain and loved statistics, a course she taught while at Bowling Green University in the 1970s’s. It caused her to puzzle over the stereotypical gender theories many researchers were touting at the time. The clichéd notion of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” first popularized by American author John Gray’s 1992 book, didn’t gibe with the broader meta-analyses she was conducting around gender. In 2005, in what would become her most-cited academic article, she argued for what would become known as the Gender Similarities Hypothesis, which posits that men and women are, in fact, much more similar than different on most psychological variables.
“That was another turning point,” says Hyde. “And I think it has had an impact on the field.”
Hyde has had plenty of additional impacts—from her own perspective, her greatest contribution has been in the classroom. Each spring, her class on human sexuality class was packed with hundreds of undergraduates who would learn about everything from ectopic pregnancies to sexual orientation.
“Professor Hyde did an amazing job of making women feel powerful and knowledgeable,” says Ariel Yang (’21), one of her former students. “It was one class where I felt encouraged to speak out and I constantly wanted to learn more.” Several other graduate students echoed that sentiment in the notes they sent in honoring her retirement, citing her as an inspiration for sparking their careers in research and teaching.
During her final semester teaching the class, Hyde shared her personal experience with breast cancer, including insights about the high level of care she had received at UW Hospital and Clinics, and the benefits for cancer patients that can be offered at a university hospital. Two different students later emailed her to say her advice had made a significant difference for them.
Although her retirement papers are officially filed, Hyde won’t fade into the background. She plans to maintain a presence on campus for the next few years and is auditing a religious studies class this fall. In her free time, she plans to tackle a new challenge: advocating to prevent gun violence, working with the organization Moms Demand Action. Hyde’s father worked for the National Safety Council, instilling a wariness about firearms in her from an early age.
“The topic of gun ownership has a lot to do with psychology, and it actually has a lot to do with gender as well,” says Hyde. “If I were 10 or 15 years younger, I would throw myself into research on that.”