Compare methods

	Attitudes Toward Women Scale	Bem Sex-Role Inventory
Field	Gender Studies	Gender Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1972	1974
Originator	Janet T. Spence and Robert Helmreich	Sandra L. Bem
Type	Self-report attitude scale	Self-report sex-role inventory
Seminal source	Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. (1972). The Attitudes Toward Women Scale: An objective instrument to measure attitudes toward the rights and roles of women in contemporary society. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 2, 66–67.	Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162.
Aliases	AWS, Spence-Helmreich AWS	BSRI, Sex-Role Inventory
Related	4	4
Summary	The Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS), developed by Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich in 1972, is a self-report Likert instrument that measures beliefs about the appropriate rights and roles of women in contemporary society. Respondents indicate their agreement with statements about vocational, educational, intellectual, marital, and social conduct expectations for women, yielding a single score that ranges from traditional and conservative to egalitarian and liberal.	The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) is a 60-item self-report instrument developed by Sandra L. Bem in 1974 to measure psychological androgyny — the degree to which a person endorses culturally masculine and culturally feminine personality attributes independently of their biological sex. Respondents rate how well each of 20 masculine, 20 feminine, and 20 neutral filler traits describes them on a 7-point scale, and are then classified as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated.