The Multidimensionality of Adolescent Girls’ Gender Attitudes

Many adolescents hold positive attitudes toward gender equality while also believing in traditional gender roles. This coexistence suggests gender attitudes are multidimensional; yet, gender attitudes are typically measured with unidimensional scales. Using confirmatory factor analysis on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale for Adolescents, we compared the unidimensional structure to a multidimensional structure of the scale, accounting for beliefs in gender equality and social role integration. Participants were 222 10th grade girls (Mage = 15.24; 38% White, 29% Latina, 24% Black; 79% heterosexual, 21% sexual minority) from the southeastern U.S. Results showed that the multidimensional structure (Factor 1: gender equality, Factor 2: social role integration) was a better fit to the data than the unidimensional structure. Girls had stronger beliefs in gender equality than social role integration with differences by race/ethnicity and sexual orientation: White girls had stronger beliefs in gender equality than Black and Latina girls, and sexual minority girls had stronger beliefs in gender equality and social role integration than heterosexual girls. This study suggests that girls’ views of gender roles have not kept pace with views of gender equality. Future work will benefit from treating these as unique dimensions of gender attitudes that may change across time and among different groups of people.