What Emerging Adults Think About Traditional Gender Roles?

This research aimed to update and refine the measurement of traditional gender role attitudes among emerging adults, a population for which existing scales are outdated. In Study 1, we administered a 20-item measure of gender role traditionalism to a U.S. national sample ( N = 578) and applied Item Response Theory (IRT) to identify the most discriminating items. Study 2 then compared the resulting seven-item short form against an established alternative measure in a separate convenience sample ( N = 357), testing its ability to distinguish gender role traditionalism from related constructs and outperform an alternative prevailing measure. We found that emerging adults no longer substantially vary in opinion regarding women in the workplace or leadership, but are divided with respect to their support for male familial authority and beliefs in stereotypes that either cast women as men’s natural subordinates or that discount feminist grievance. The retained items cohered to a single latent factor that was more strongly endorsed by men and non-White participants. It also emerged as incrementally more valid than the Attitudes Towards Women (AWS) scale, as well as empirically distinct from political identification, traditional masculine ideology, social dominance orientation, and ambivalent sexism. These studies offer the first psychometrically rigorous, concise scale of gender role traditionalism tailored to emerging adults, as well as illuminate the contemporary fault lines in gender role attitudes. The new measure both advances theoretical understanding and provides a precise tool for future research on gender-attitude dynamics that proved superior to the most frequently used alternative.