Evaluating Measures of Contemporary Sexism

Abstract

Two recently published measures of contemporary sexist attitudes were examined and compared with a sample of 106 Canadian college students. Swim, Aikin, Hall, and Hunter's (1995) Modern Sexism scale was found to be an acceptable measure of sexist attitudes in terms of its internal reliability and its ability to predict other gender-related political attitudes. Although the Modern Sexism scale and the Neosexism scale (Tougas, Brown, Beaton, & Joly, 1995) were equally good at predicting support for the feminist movement and attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, the Neosexism scale had better internal reliability and exhibited stronger gender differences. Moreover, the Neosexism scale was superior at predicting value orientations relevant to modern prejudices.