Sex Roles, Vol. 17, Nos. 5/6, 1987

Age and Gender Differences in College Students' Attitudes Toward Women: A Replication and Extension

Kathleen McKinney Oklahoma State University

This study replicates and extends earlier research on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (J. T. Spence and R. L. Helmreich, "The Attitudes Towards Women Scale: An Objective Instrument to Measure Attitudes Towards the Rights and Roles o f Women in Contemporary Society," JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 1972, 2, 66). The scale was administered to 382 college students to assess the reliability o f the scale, gender and age differences in responses to the scale, and to make comparisons to past research with different samples. Age was positively associated with more liberal atti- tudes toward women. Females were more liberal overall than males; however, this depended on the particular item.

Research in the area of attitudes toward women's role in society has revealed several differences between social groups on these attitudes. One commonly used scale is the Attitudes Towards Women Scale (AWS) by Spence and Helmreich (1972). This scale taps the roles, behavior, and attitudes that people feel are appropriate or inappropriate for women.

Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp (1973), using a short version of the AWS, reported that female college students score significantly higher (more liber- al) than their male peers, that the mothers of these students score signifi- cantly higher than the fathers, and that students score significantly higher than their parents. In a study of high school students, college students, and their parents, Spence and Helmreich (1978, 1979) found that at all age groups women score significantly more liberal or nontraditional in their attitudes toward women than do men. For females, no difference in mean scores ex- isted between the high school and college students. Both these groups were

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significantly more liberal than the mothers of the college students. A differ- ent ordering of mean scores was found for the males where the most liberal groups was college students followed by their fathers and lastly by the high school students.

Gender differences across two generations on the mean scores on in- dividual items has also been studied by Spence and Helmreich (1972) using the full 55-item AWS. College women gave more conservative or traditional attitudes on 8 of these items and more liberal attitudes on 39 items compared to the men. Mothers were more conservative on 7 and more liberal on 23 of the items than the fathers. Furthermore, there was a great deal of similar- ity between the generations on the items which the genders differed.

Finally, using their previous data and collecting more recent AWS data, Helmreich, Spence, and Gibson (1982) have looked at shifts in attitudes toward women over time. They report large shifts by all respondents toward more liberal or equalitarian attitudes from 1972 to 1976. However, between 1976 and 1980 they found no shift in liberalism in male students, and only a small significant shift in this direction among women. Their item analysis indicat- ed more support by both genders for equality on items dealing with vocation- al and educational areas. As for gender differences, women held more liberal views than men on 14 of the 15 items on the AWS.

The present article is a partial replication of the Spence et al. (1972, 1973, 1978, 1979) and Helmreich et al. (1982) research. This paper deals with several issues. First, the students used in the present research are from a differ- ent part of the country than the previous samples (the Midwest vs New En- gland and the Southwest). Second, several years have passed since most of the previous research assessed attitudes toward women. In this study, the reliability of the AWS, gender differences in item and total scores, and the relationship between age and attitudes toward women are assessed.

METHODS

Sample and Procedure

The respondents in this study were 382 college students at the Univer- sity of Wisconsin--Madison who were enrolled in one of two semesters in a large, open enrollment sociology course. There were 212 males and 170 females in the sample. Respondents' ages ranged from 18 to 39 with a mean age of 20.2. Almost all the respondents were white (approximately 98%).

Students were self-administered the AWS during a regularly scheduled class period on an anonymous and volunteer basis. The scale was administered early in the semester before discussions of sex roles or related topics had oc-

Age and Gender Differences 355

curred. Less than 5% of the students present on the days the scale was ad- ministered refused to participate.

Measures

The 25-item version of the AWS was used. This scale correlates almost perfectly (.97) with the full 55 item AWS (Spence et al., 1973). Each item is scored 0-3 where 0 is the most traditional or conservative response and 3 is the most liberal or nontraditional response. Total scores may range from 0 to 75. Higher total scores indicate more liberal or nontraditional attitudes towards women. Two reliability estimates were computed for the AWS with this sample. Both coefficients indicate the scale is quite reliable. Cronbach's alpha was .90 and the Guttman split-half coefficient was .87. (See Spence, et al., 1973, for a copy of the scale). Respondents were also asked to indi- cate their age and gender on the AWS form.

RESULTS

Age

Respondent's age was positively correlated with total AWS score, although the size of the correlation was small (Pearson r -- . 11; p = .02). Older college students had significantly more liberal or nontraditional atti- tudes toward women than younger college students. More specifically, age was positively associated with responses on 6 of the 25 items (items 1, 4, 9, 11, 21, 25). Older respondents were more likely to agree that "a woman should be as free as a man to propose marriage," that "women earning as much as their dates should bear equally the expense when they go out together," that "economic and social freedom is worth more to women than acceptance of the ideal of femininity that has been set up by men," that "the modern girl is entitled to the same freedom from regulation and control that is given to the modern boy," and more likely to disagree that "swearing and obscenity are more repulsive in the speech of a woman than of a man" and that "tell- ing dirty jokes should be mostly a masculine perogative".

Gender Differences

The mean total AWS score for the whole sample was 57.86 with a range from 10 to 75. The mean score for the men was 53.08 with a range from 10 to 75. For the women the mean was 63.83 with scores ranging from 31

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Table I. Gender Differences on AWS Items ( d f =

380)

X p, Item no. Men Women t two-tailed

1 1.12 1.50 3.52 .000 2 2.20 2.80 8.78 .000 3 2.84 2.86 0.54 .592 4 2.12 2.44 3.78 .000 5 2.25 2.52 3.37 .001 6 2.25 2.86 8.23 .000 7 1.40 2.25 8.35 .000 8 2.56 2.82 3.86 .000 9 2.12 2.16 0.36 .720

10 2.08 2.67 7.19 .000 11 2.21 2.20 0.09 .931 12 2.29 2.71 5.51 .000 13 2.04 2.66 7.24 .000 14 2.57 2.93 5.02 .000 15 2.09 2.74 7.44 .000 16 2.22 2.69 5.67 .000 17 2.40 2.50 1.16 .249 18 1.95 2.64 7.37 .000 19 2.11 2.78 9.03 .000 20 2.17 2.74 6.99 .000 21 1.61 1.96 3.75 .000 22 2.11 2.78 8.54 .000 23 1.38 2.26 8.79 .000 24 2.41 2.83 6.21 .000 25 2.38 2.52 1.71 .089

to 75. This difference, with women repor t ing more liberal or non t r ad i t i ona l

at t i tudes toward women than men, was highly s ignif icant (t = 10.35; p < .001). Gender differences were found for 20 of 25 individual items as well.

The women scored signif icant ly more liberal on all 20 of these items (all ps

< .001; see Table I for the means and t values). W o m e n disagreed with men on all bu t five items. In other words, for

five items the women were equal ly conservat ive/ l ibera l as the men. These were i tems 3, 9, 11, 17, and 25. These items all focus on equal i ty between the genders in terms of grounds for divorce, p ropos ing marr iage, paying for date expenses, sexual in t imacy before marr iage, and f reedom f rom regula- t ion. Almos t all the items where the women scored more liberal than the men deal with equal oppor tun i ty and evalua t ion in social, occupat ional , leader-

ship, and educat ional areas.

D I S C U S S I O N

It is unclear whether the positive corre la t ion f ound between age and l iberal at t i tudes towards women in this s tudy conflicts with the results of

Age and Gender Differences 357

Spence et al. (1972, 1973, 1978, 1979). They found that college students had significantly more liberal attitudes than their parents. Younger female high school students had attitudes that did not differ from the female college stu- dents. However, male high school students were more conservative than the male college students and their fathers. There are several differences among these three groups of individuals other than age that may have affected the results, including student or parental roles, generation, cohort, and life cy- cle stage.

The positive correlation between age and liberal attitudes toward women in the present research was found within a very restricted sample of ages (predominately 18 to 22 year olds), making comparisons to the previous research that compared students to their parents difficult. One plausible ex- planation for this relationship would be the accumulation of new experiences and exposure to more nontraditional sex roles and attitudes about women as the college student stays in school longer. Furthermore, it may be that there is a curvilinear relationship between age and attitudes toward women. Finally, there may be a positive relationship between education and attitudes toward women. The parents may have less college education than their children.

The overall gender differences reported by Spence et al. (1972, 1973, 1978, 1979) and Helmreich et al. (1982) in their samples of Texas college students and their parents, and New England high school students are repli- cated two to ten years later in this sample of Wisconsin college students. Young college women still have significantly more liberal or nontraditional attitudes toward women's roles and rights in society than do their male peers. However, the means for both the male and female students in Spence et al. (1973), where the 25-item scale version was also used, were substantially lower than those for the students in this sample. This increase in liberalism on the part of both men and women may be a result of a liberalizing change over time in attitudes toward women or may be due to the different samples and locales of the research. Probably both of these factors contributed to the increase in liberalism. The trends toward increasing liberalism found by Helm- reich et al. (1982) within the same locale and similar samples indicates that some of the changes over time do reflect an actual liberalizing effect. Their data also suggests a leveling off of this trend.

The gender differences on the individual items show an interesting pat- tern. Although Helmreich et al. (1982) report increasing liberalism by both genders over time on items related to vocational and educational opportuni- ties, women in this sample still report more accepting and liberal attitudes than men toward the equality and rights of women in areas that will benefit them, such as political, occupational, educational, and social roles. However, women indicate somewhat more conservative attitudes, in agreement with the men, on issues concerning equality of the genders in the areas of divorce, marriage proposals, dating expenses, sexual intimacy, and freedom from regu-

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la t ion . Thus there are behav io rs tha t , due to learn ing a n d / o r pe rcep t ions o f po ten t i a l losses, w o m e n m a y no t yet be will ing to accept equa l respons ib i l i ty

for . Several issues remain to be examined in future research, including clarifi-

ca t ion o f the na tu re o f the i tems tha t reveal gender d i f ferences and o f the re la t ionsh ip be tween age and A W S scores, r ep l i ca t ion o f the results in m o r e diverse samples , and fu r the r inves t iga t ion o f the changes in a t t i tudes t o w a r d w o m e n over t ime and by locale, including whether the l iberalizing t rend across

t ime is leveling off .

REFERENCES

Helmreich, R. L., Spence, J. T., & Gibson, R. H. Sex-role attitudes: 1972-1980. Personality and Social Psychology BulletM, 1982, 8, 656-663.

Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. The attitudes towards women scale: An objective instrument to measure attitudes towards the rights and roles of women in contemporary society. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 1972, 2, 66.

Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. Masculinity andfemMinity: Their psychological dimensions, correlates and antecedents. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978.

Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. Comparison of masculine and feminine personality attrib- utes and sex role attitudes across age groups. Developmentalpsychology, 1979, 15, 583-584.

Spence, J. T., Heimreich, R. L., & Stapp, J. A short version of the attitudes towards women scale (AWS). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1973, 2, 219-220.