Helen Thompson Woolley

Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley (1874 to 1947) was an American psychologist known for her work on sex differences, research methods and education. Born in Englewood, a suburb of Chicago, she studied at the University of Chicago, where James Rowland Angell supervised her graduate work, and took her doctorate there in 1900. Her dissertation, Psychological Norms in Men and Women, was the first major experimental study comparing the mental traits of women and men and was later published as The Mental Traits of Sex. She followed her physician husband Paul Woolley to Japan and the Philippines, where she worked for the Bureau of Education, and later worked with the Vocation Bureau, the Merrill-Palmer School and the Institute for Child Welfare Research at Teachers College, Columbia University.