Feminist Identity Development Scale
Also known as: FIDS, Feminist Identity Scale
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.
Key highlights
- Operationalises a well-known developmental theory, giving the abstract Downing and Roush stages a measurable form.
- Captures feminist identity as a multi-stage process rather than a single attitude, yielding a richer profile across five subscales.
- Useful as an outcome measure for women's studies courses and consciousness-raising interventions, with documented sensitivity to such experiences.
- Grounded in a broader family of identity-development models, allowing comparison with racial and other social-identity research.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the FIDS in research and counselling contexts that examine how women come to understand sexism and develop a feminist identity, including studies of the effects of women's studies courses, consciousness-raising, and life experiences on gender-related attitudes. It is appropriate for tracking change over time, comparing groups at different developmental points, and as an outcome measure for educational interventions. It is less appropriate as a simple measure of whether someone 'is a feminist', since it models a multi-stage process, and it was designed for women, so its stages and items may not transfer directly to men or to other identity processes without adaptation.
Strengths & limitations
- Operationalises a well-known developmental theory, giving the abstract Downing and Roush stages a measurable form.
- Captures feminist identity as a multi-stage process rather than a single attitude, yielding a richer profile across five subscales.
- Useful as an outcome measure for women's studies courses and consciousness-raising interventions, with documented sensitivity to such experiences.
- Grounded in a broader family of identity-development models, allowing comparison with racial and other social-identity research.
- The factor structure and number of recoverable stages have been debated, and some studies find the embeddedness-emanation stage difficult to measure cleanly.
- It was developed and validated with women, so it does not directly capture how men or non-binary people relate to feminism.
- The stage model implies a developmental progression that does not always hold; respondents often endorse multiple stages at once.
- Item content reflects the period and context of its development and may need updating for contemporary and cross-cultural samples.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What are the five stages measured by the FIDS?
The five stages from the Downing and Roush model are passive acceptance (unquestioned acceptance of traditional gender roles), revelation (new awareness of and anger about sexism), embeddedness-emanation (immersion in connection with other women), synthesis (an integrated feminist identity balanced with other parts of the self), and active commitment (translating feminist identity into action for social change). The FIDS has a subscale for each.
Do women move through the stages in a fixed order?
Not strictly. The model is developmental and the stages are ordered conceptually from passive acceptance to active commitment, but in practice women often endorse items from several stages at once, and movement is not always linear. The FIDS profile is therefore best read as a description of where a woman currently is in an ongoing process rather than as a single discrete stage she has reached and left behind.
How does the FIDS differ from an attitudes-toward-women measure?
An attitudes scale such as the AWS places a person on a single dimension from traditional to egalitarian beliefs about women's rights and roles. The FIDS instead models the developmental process by which a woman builds a feminist identity, with separate subscales for qualitatively different stages including emotional ones like revelation and behavioural ones like active commitment. It captures process and self-identity rather than a single attitude.
Sources
- 1.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.
- 2.Downing, N. E., & Roush, K. L. (1985). From passive acceptance to active commitment: A model of feminist identity development for women. The Counseling Psychologist, 13(4), 695–709.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Feminist Identity Development Scale. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/gender-studies/feminist-identity-development-scale