Compare methods

	Attitudes Toward Women Scale	Feminist Identity Development Scale
Field	Gender Studies	Gender Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1972	1991
Originator	Janet T. Spence and Robert Helmreich	Adena Bargad and Janet Shibley Hyde
Type	Self-report attitude scale	Self-report developmental stage scale
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.	Bargad, A., & Hyde, J. S. (1991). Women's studies: A study of feminist identity development in women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 15(2), 181–201.
Aliases	AWS, Spence-Helmreich AWS	FIDS, Feminist Identity Scale
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 Feminist Identity Development Scale (FIDS), developed by Adena Bargad and Janet Hyde in 1991, is a 39-item self-report instrument that operationalises Downing and Roush's (1985) five-stage model of how women develop a feminist identity. Its five subscales correspond to the stages of passive acceptance, revelation, embeddedness-emanation, synthesis, and active commitment, capturing where a woman stands in the process of recognising and responding to sexism.