Consistency of Female Gender Attitudes: A Research Note

Abstract

The considerable body of past research on attitudes towards gender usually singled out some particular element: beliefs about psychological sex differences, or ideals of femininity and masculinity, and, most extensively, attitudes towards sex roles in various institutional sectors. By contrast, the theoretical focus of this research is on interrelationships and, conversely, disjunctions among beliefs, ideals, and sex-role attitudes exemplified by a random sample of freshmen, entering a women's college in September 1979. Numerous recent studies of attitudes towards gender have generally focused on some single component of what might be termed gender ideology. Most extensive is the literature on attitudes towards sex roles in various institutional sectors. Another significant strand of research deals with beliefs about psychological sex differences, more specifically, the degree of stereotyping of feminine and masculine traits. Finally, and less frequently, researchers have addressed themselves to the ideals of femininity and masculinity held by their respondents and the extent of differentiation in the ideal attributes of the sexes. Neglected in this volume of research is the problem of the degree of consistency among beliefs, role prescriptions, and ideals, with only a few studies addressing this issue. (See Kammeyer; Nielson and Doyle; Rapin and Cooper.) On the one hand, we might hypothesize that psychological sex stereotyping and role prescriptions are expressions of the same underlying attitudes. After all, historically, the societal support for sex-role differentiation was buttressed by the belief in significant psychological sex *This research, done in the fall of 1979, was supported by N.I.E. Grant # G-79-0087. Address correspondence to Mirra Komarovsky, Department of Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University, 606 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027. C 1984 The University of North Carolina Press 1020 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 21 Sep 2016 05:38:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Gender Attitude Consistency / 1021 differences. On the other hand, however, cognitive dissonance and ethical inconsistencies are too widespread to rule out, a priori, their manifestation also in attitudes towards gender. This research, aimed to test these conflicting hypotheses, has methodological and theoretical implications. Should beliefs, norms, and ideals be found to lack a high degree of consistency, such result would dictate caution in their occasional interchangeable use in comparative studies of trends in gender ideology. Moreover the varying degrees of consistency or disjunction among these components will open up a significant set of theoretical issues for future research as to social variables accounting for such variations in consistency.