Measuring attitudes towards gender: Approaches across concepts, cultures and methods

Abstract

The measurement of attitudes towards gender comes in a variety of conceptual and methodological shapes. In this panel, we seek to connect contributions that measure attitudes towards gender from different theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives and across different countries. By systematically assessing the conceptualization and measurement of gender attitudes, this panel intends to motivate critical reflection on theoretical basis, empirical design, and epistemological consequences of measurement instruments to evaluate public opinions around gender issues. For the longest time, measurement instruments sought to establish convergent validity of gender equality attitudes through left-wing political orientations. Melanie Dietz and Sigrid Roßteutscher add nuance to this by analyzing the association between support and rejection of gender equality policies and LGBTIQ* rights with the GAL-TAN dimension in Germany. Katharina Heger picks up similar policy issues around gender and LGBTIQ* in Germany to establish a new scale of contemporary feminist attitudes that can be distinguished along the cleavages of materialist versus post-materialist gender politics, and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the role feminism plays for politics in contemporary Western societies. Amy Alexander, Nicolas Charron, and Gefjon Off measure the impact of framing on public support of gender equality policies by employing survey experiments across 27 EU countries, thus contributing knowledge about how the understanding and measurement of gender equality attitudes depends on the communicative context. Since gender equality and feminism can also be considered as undesirable or even problematic, Eva Anduiza and Gefjon Off propose a measurement of feminism as threatening to analyze related attitudes and behaviors using panel data from Spain. Paula Zuluaga, Marta Fraile and Eva Anduiza consider simultaneously a wide range of different indicators of sexism to see whether different dimensions identified by the theory can be empirically substantiated and to analyze their predictors and their explanatory power.

Title	Details
Different Colors of the Same Rainbow? Gender Issues, their Interplay with political Issues and their Electoral Relevance	View Paper Details
Varieties of feminism revisited: A new instrument to measure three paradigms of contemporary feminist thinking	View Paper Details
Who supports (opposes) gender equality policy, and can different policy framings make a difference?	View Paper Details
Sexism as a Multidimensional Concept: An Empirical Examination of Traditional, Ambivalent, and Modern Sexism	View Paper Details
Feminism as a threat	View Paper Details