The Search for Ambivalent Sexism: a Comparison of Two Measures

Abstract

Glick and Fiske have claimed that prior sexism measures are biased because they only capture hostile sexist attitudes and fail to tap benevolent sexist attitudes. The authors of the current article believe that other measures of sexism do, in fact, capture some aspects of benevolent sexism. To examine this hypothesis, they compared Swim, Aikin, Hall, and Hunter’s old-fashioned and modern sexism scales with Glick and Fiske’s Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) scales (i.e., benevolent and hostile sexism), asserting that modern sexism directly measures ambivalent sexism and therefore indirectly captures both hostile and benevolent attitudes. Results supported the authors’ hypothesis and refuted Glick and Fiske’s argument. Implications of findings are discussed in terms of the measurement of sexist attitudes in future research.