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Rhoda K. Unger (1939–2019) was a feminist psychologist known for her position at the forefront of female activism in psychology. Unger was strongly committed to promoting social justice within society and women in science. She was a professor of psychology at Montclair State College for almost thirty years and was granted the status of Professor Emerita in 1999. After her retirement, Unger was a resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
Unger was a pioneering figure in the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP), the Society for the Psychology of Women (American Psychological Association, Division 35), and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). She served terms as President of the Society for the Psychology of Women (1980–1981) and President of the SPSSI (1998–1999), and was the inaugural editor of SPSSI's journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
Unger was awarded the gold medal for Lifetime Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Foundation in 2007.
Unger was an assistant professor at Hofstra University from 1966 to 1972. During this time, her interests shifted from physiological psychology to social psychology. She joined the faculty of Montclair State College in 1972 and she remained there until her retirement in 1999. Unger was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Haifa (1988–1989).
Unger married Burton M. Unger, April 11, 1966, and they had two children together. Unger died on April 19, 2019, in Concord, MA.
Unger considered herself an empirical psychologist and focused her research efforts on addressing social problems. She critiqued the constructs of sex and gender and how they were used in research and drew attention to how research methods represent and replicate specific world views. In a seminal paper titled Toward a redefinition of sex and gender, Unger aimed to redefine the terms sex and gender in psychological research by defining sex as a stimulus variable and gender as a collection of characteristics and traits deemed appropriate to males and females. Her emphasis on terminology allowed researchers to focus on sociocultural and environmental factors (e.g., family structure, race-ethnicity, religion) that contribute to, and provide explanations for, differences often presumed to have biological origins.
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