The Schedule Of Sexist Events: A Measure of Lifetime and Recent Sexist Discrimination in Women's Lives

Abstract

This paper describes the development, reliability, and validity of the Schedule of Sexist Events (SSE), a measure of lifetime and recent (past year) sexist discrimination in women's lives. A culturally diverse standardization sample of 631 women completed the 20-item SSE. Factor analyses revealed that the SSE-Lifetime and SSE-Recent have four factors: Sexist Degradation, Sexism in Distant Relationships, Sexism in Close Relationships, and Sexist Discrimination in the Workplace. The SSE-Lifetime and SSE-Recent scales had high internal-consistency (.92, .90) and split-half (.87, .83) reliability, and the factors were similarly reliable. Validity was established by demonstrating that scores on the SSE-Lifetime and SSE-Recent correlate as well with two other measures of stressful events (the Hassles Frequency and the PERI—Life Events scales [PERI-LES]) as those measures correlate with each other. Sexist discrimination (events) can be understood as gender-specific, negative life events (stressors). Descriptive data indicated that sexist discrimination is rampant in women's lives. Additional analyses revealed significant status differences in experiencing sexist discrimination, with women of color reporting more sexism in their lives than White women.