Gender Role Attitudes Scale
Also known as: Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale, SRES, Gender Role Ideology Scale
Gender role attitudes scales measure how egalitarian or traditional a person's beliefs are about the appropriate roles, rights, and behaviours of women and men. The best-validated example is the Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale (SRES) developed by Lynda and Daniel King in 1997, which assesses attitudes across marital, parental, employment, social-interpersonal, and educational domains. Such scales sit alongside the Attitudes Toward Women Scale as standard instruments for capturing gender ideology in social and psychological research.
Key highlights
- Provide validated, reliable quantification of gender ideology with decades of psychometric evidence.
- The Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale separates attitudes across multiple role domains rather than collapsing them.
- Multiple forms (full and short, alternate versions) support repeated administration and experimental designs.
- Widely used, so scores can be benchmarked against extensive normative and cross-cultural data.
Intuition
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
How it works
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
When to use it
Use a gender role attitudes scale when you need a validated, quantitative measure of how traditional or egalitarian respondents' gender ideology is — for example to compare attitudes across cohorts, predict the division of household labour, or evaluate the effect of an intervention. The SRES is preferable when domain-specific attitudes matter, the Attitudes Toward Women Scale when a brief general measure suffices. These scales are less suitable for capturing subtle or modern forms of sexism, for which the Modern Sexism or Ambivalent Sexism instruments are designed, and dated item content can limit validity in some contemporary or cross-cultural samples.
Strengths & limitations
- Provide validated, reliable quantification of gender ideology with decades of psychometric evidence.
- The Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale separates attitudes across multiple role domains rather than collapsing them.
- Multiple forms (full and short, alternate versions) support repeated administration and experimental designs.
- Widely used, so scores can be benchmarked against extensive normative and cross-cultural data.
- Item content reflects the era of development and can feel dated or culturally specific in modern samples.
- Susceptible to social-desirability and ceiling effects as egalitarian attitudes become normative.
- Measure explicit, self-reported attitudes only, not implicit or behavioural gender bias.
- Capture endorsement of equality in principle, which may diverge from actual behaviour.
Common pitfalls
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Applications
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Frequently asked
How does the SRES differ from the Bem Sex-Role Inventory?
The Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale measures attitudes — how egalitarian or traditional one believes the roles of women and men should be. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory measures self-perceived personality traits, classifying respondents as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. One is about beliefs regarding gender roles in society; the other is about how a person describes their own gendered characteristics, so they tap related but distinct constructs.
Why are some items reverse-keyed?
Balancing traditionally and egalitarian-worded items, with some reverse-keyed, reduces acquiescence bias — the tendency to agree regardless of content. Before scoring, reverse-keyed items are recoded so that, on every item, a higher value means more egalitarian. Omitting this recoding mixes opposing items and produces a meaningless total, so it is the first and most error-prone step in scoring.
Do high egalitarian attitude scores predict egalitarian behaviour?
Only partially. Attitudes correlate with behaviours such as the household division of labour and support for equality policies, but the relationship is moderate: people often endorse equality in principle while their behaviour lags, and social-desirability pressure inflates self-reported egalitarianism. Researchers therefore pair attitude scales with behavioural or time-use measures when behaviour is the real outcome of interest.
Sources
- 1.King, L. A., & King, D. W. (1997). Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale: Development, psychometric properties, and recommendations for future research. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(1), 71–87.
- 2.Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1973). A short version of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 2(4), 219–220.
You have read it. What now?
Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Gender Role Attitudes Scale. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/gender-studies/gender-role-attitudes-scale