Gender Role Attitudes: Traditional vs. Egalitarian Views

How someone answers the question “Should both partners share household chores equally?” reveals far more than a personal preference – it reflects a deeper set of beliefs about what men and women are supposed to do, be, and become. These beliefs are what psychologists call gender role attitudes, and they sit at the heart of how gender inequality is perpetuated or dismantled in everyday life. From career choices to caregiving arrangements, from marriage to the classroom, gender role attitudes shape behavior in ways that are both visible and surprisingly subtle. Understanding what these attitudes are, how researchers measure them, and how they are evolving is essential to grasping where gender equality stands today.

What are gender role attitudes? 🔗

Gender role attitudes are the beliefs and values individuals hold about what constitutes appropriate behavior, responsibilities, and roles for men and women across different life domains – family, work, education, and public life. They are not simply opinions; they function as evaluative frameworks that guide expectations and judgments about others. Research published in PMC describes gender role attitudes as existing on a continuum from traditional to egalitarian. At the traditional end, attitudes reinforce a clear division where men are breadwinners and women are homemakers and caregivers. At the egalitarian end, attitudes support equal roles, shared responsibilities, and access to opportunity regardless of gender.

It is important to distinguish gender role attitudes from gender stereotypes and gender roles themselves. A study in the Social Psychology of Education clarifies these distinctions: gender stereotypes describe what men and women typically are thought to be like, gender roles prescribe what they should do, while gender role attitudes reflect a person’s evaluative stance toward those prescriptions – whether they endorse or reject them. In short, someone can be aware of a gender stereotype without personally endorsing it, and that endorsement or rejection is what gender role attitude measures.

Traditional gender role attitudes 🔗

Traditional gender role attitudes uphold a strict division of labor based on gender. They center on male authority in economic and public spheres, and female responsibility in the domestic sphere. Someone with strongly traditional attitudes might believe that men should be the primary financial providers, that women are naturally better suited to child-rearing, or that leadership is inherently masculine. These beliefs are not random – they are typically transmitted through family socialization, religious teachings, cultural norms, and community environments. Research in the Psychosocia journal identifies four major shapers of gender role attitudes: cultural norms and tradition, religion, education level, and the social environment including family, peers, and media.

Egalitarian gender role attitudes 🔗

Egalitarian gender role attitudes reject the notion that roles should be assigned based on gender. They support equal access to education and employment, shared household and caregiving responsibilities, and the freedom for individuals to pursue interests without being constrained by gendered expectations. Crucially, egalitarian attitudes are not monolithic. A landmark study published in the American Journal of Sociology identified three distinct varieties of egalitarianism that have emerged across European nations – liberal egalitarianism, egalitarian familism, and flexible egalitarianism – showing that different societies are not converging toward a single model but are finding different paths toward gender equality.

It is also worth noting that attitudes are domain-specific. As cross-cultural research in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology observes, a person may hold egalitarian views about workplace roles while simultaneously holding traditional views about household responsibilities. Gender role attitudes are not always internally consistent, which is precisely why careful measurement matters.

Measuring gender role attitudes 🔗

Because gender role attitudes are internal beliefs, researchers rely on standardized psychometric tools to assess them systematically. The two most influential instruments in the psychology of gender are the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) and the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). Each captures a different dimension of how people evaluate gender roles.

The Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) 🔗

The Attitudes Toward Women Scale was developed by psychologists Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich in 1972, making it one of the earliest and most widely used instruments for measuring gender role attitudes. According to the University of Miami’s measures library, the AWS has three versions – a 55-item original, a 25-item version, and a 15-item short form – with the 15-item version being the most commonly used by researchers given its strong correlation with the full scale. Respondents rate their agreement with statements spanning vocational equality, social and interpersonal expectations, and domestic roles.

The AWS places attitudes on a spectrum from traditional to egalitarian, and it has served as a powerful longitudinal tool. A meta-analytic study by Jean Twenge (1997) analyzed data from 71 samples of American undergraduates who had taken the AWS between 1970 and 1995, finding a consistent and statistically significant shift toward more egalitarian attitudes over that period, with women’s scores more strongly correlated with the year of administration than men’s. Importantly, follow-up work by Spence and Hahn (1997) comparing cohorts from 1972 to 1992 confirmed that across both sexes, the 1992 cohort was the most egalitarian, while the 1972 cohort was the least – with women consistently holding less traditional attitudes than men at every time point.

By the 1990s, however, researchers noted a limitation: as societal attitudes became more egalitarian, AWS scores began showing a ceiling effect, particularly among women. This meant the scale was no longer discriminating well between respondents who held moderately versus strongly egalitarian views – a sign that newer, more nuanced tools were needed.

The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) 🔗

In 1996, social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske introduced the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), a 22-item self-report scale built on the insight that sexism – and by extension, gender role attitudes – is not simply a matter of overt hostility toward women. According to the theory of ambivalent sexism, prejudice toward women takes two distinct but complementary forms that together reinforce traditional gender hierarchies.

Hostile sexism (HS) captures overtly negative evaluations of women – beliefs that women are manipulative, incompetent, or unfairly seeking advantages over men. This is the form of sexism most people recognize intuitively. Benevolent sexism (BS), by contrast, consists of attitudes that appear superficially positive – the idea that women are morally pure, should be cherished and protected by men, or are naturally suited to nurturing roles. Glick and Fiske (1997) argued that both forms of sexism serve to justify and maintain patriarchal structures, with hostile sexism punishing women who deviate from traditional roles and benevolent sexism rewarding those who conform.

The ASI’s three subscales within benevolent sexism – protective paternalism, complementary gender differentiation, and heterosexual intimacy – allow researchers to measure how traditional gender role attitudes can be expressed through seemingly kind or chivalrous attitudes. A systematic review of ambivalent sexism research published in PubMed confirmed that hostile and benevolent sexism function as a coordinated system: hostile sexism guards male power, while benevolent sexism enforces traditional gender roles by rewarding women’s compliance with warmth and protection. This dual structure makes the ASI particularly effective at capturing the full complexity of gendered beliefs – including the subtle attitudes that might not register as problematic on older scales.

Why measurement matters 🔗

These tools do more than satisfy academic curiosity. They make invisible beliefs visible and quantifiable, allowing researchers to track how attitudes differ across age groups, education levels, cultures, and time. A cross-national study published in the Asian Journal of Social Science using survey data from 24 regions found that higher educational attainment, having a working mother, and being employed as a woman were all independently associated with holding more egalitarian gender role attitudes – findings that would not have been possible without standardized measurement instruments. Similarly, the ASI has revealed that even individuals who reject overt hostility toward women may still score high on benevolent sexism, indicating a more insidious form of traditional gender role endorsement.

Shifting perspectives on gender roles 🔗

The most consistent finding across decades of research is directional: gender role attitudes in most developed societies have moved steadily toward greater egalitarianism over the past half-century. This shift is neither uniform nor complete, but it represents a meaningful transformation in how people think about the appropriate roles of men and women.

What’s driving the shift 🔗

Several structural and psychological forces are behind this change. Education is among the most consistently documented. Cross-national research found that individuals with higher education levels showed a significantly greater tendency toward egalitarian gender role attitudes, an effect observed across all 24 regions studied. Workforce participation also plays a role: women with employment experience are considerably more likely to hold egalitarian attitudes, and growing up with a working mother has a similar effect on both daughters and sons.

Life transitions, however, can temporarily reverse this trend. A notable study on the transition to parenthood, published in PMC, found that gender role attitudes became more traditional for both men and women in the twelve months following the birth of a child, with the effect being more pronounced for experienced parents than first-time parents. This suggests that when structural pressures (like who takes parental leave or who reduces work hours) are not equally shared, attitudes temporarily conform to behavior rather than the reverse.

Where egalitarianism is – and isn’t – taking hold 🔗

The shift toward egalitarian gender role attitudes is real, but uneven. Research published in the American Journal of Sociology tracking two decades of gender role attitude change across Europe showed that while traditional attitudes have declined sharply, different countries have moved toward different forms of egalitarianism rather than converging on a single model. Cultural context still shapes which domains of equality people embrace first – paid work versus household labor, for example, often move at different rates.

In countries undergoing rapid social change, findings can be counterintuitive. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology examining data from the Chinese General Social Survey found that egalitarian gender role attitudes correlated positively with self-reported happiness for both men and women – but men showed a stronger happiness boost. The study identified several reasons: egalitarian attitudes alleviate economic pressure on men by reducing expectations that they bear the full financial burden of a household, reduce family-role conflict, and generate more equitable emotional relationships. This finding challenges the assumption that men universally resist gender equality as contrary to their interests.

In student populations specifically, the connection between egalitarian attitudes and broader outcomes is increasingly evident. A 2024 study using PISA data from Germany found that egalitarian gender role attitudes among ninth-grade students were associated with reduced gender gaps in academic performance, particularly closing the divide in reading achievement. When students hold the belief that academic success is equally important for all genders, stereotyped performance gaps narrow – a finding with direct implications for educational policy.

The persistence of traditional attitudes 🔗

Despite these shifts, traditional gender role attitudes remain deeply embedded in many contexts. Rural communities, highly religious populations, and societies with lower female employment rates continue to show stronger endorsement of traditional role divisions. Even within more egalitarian societies, benevolent sexism – as captured by the ASI – persists widely, often without recognition. Many people who would firmly reject the idea of hostile sexism simultaneously hold benevolently sexist attitudes: believing women deserve special protection, that men should provide for women, or that women are morally superior. The systematic review of ambivalent sexism research confirms that this coexistence is not accidental – benevolent sexism actively limits women’s autonomy and reinforces traditional role structures even when framed in positive terms.

This means that measuring the true state of gender role attitudes in any population requires looking beyond surface-level rejection of overt discrimination. The AWS tracks the broad arc of change well, but the ASI reveals how much traditional thinking can linger beneath a veneer of progressive values – a crucial distinction for researchers, educators, and policymakers working toward genuine gender equality.

Gender role attitudes are not fixed features of human psychology. They are shaped by education, experience, culture, and structural conditions, and they have demonstrably shifted over time toward greater egalitarianism in much of the world. Yet the tools researchers use to measure them consistently show that this transformation is incomplete, domain-specific, and sometimes masked by subtler forms of bias. Understanding these attitudes – where they come from, how they are measured, and where they are heading – is not merely an academic exercise. It is foundational to understanding how inequality is sustained and how it can be meaningfully challenged.

What do you think? If someone openly supports gender equality in the workplace but expects women to take on more childcare responsibilities at home, does that qualify as an egalitarian gender role attitude – or something more complicated? And considering how structural factors like education and employment shape these attitudes, what does that suggest about the most effective pathways to genuine gender equality?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3764615/
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11218-024-09913-3
3. https://journal.idscipub.com/index.php/psychosocia/article/download/383/382/1842
4. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/689814
5. https://psyc.fss.um.edu.mo/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/gender-role-egalitarian-attitudes-in-beijing-hong-kong-florida-and-michigan.pdf
6. https://elcentro.sonhs.miami.edu/research/measures-library/aws/index.html
7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00099.x
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00098.x
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambivalent_sexism
10. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00104.x
11. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37824246/
12. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261248490_Gender_Role_Attitudes_around_the_Globe_Egalitarian_vs_Traditional_Views
13. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1419942/full