68 Chapter 3acceptable, then you have an egalitarian view
of gender roles. Most people find they agree
with some of these ideas, but not all, or they
only agree in part with each of the ideas. For
example, most people find it acceptable for
women to work outside the home—which
is a good thing, because most women do.
Fewer people find it acceptable for a woman
to work outside the home when she has a
3-month-old child and there is no financial
need for her to work.
Attitudes toward men’s and women’s
roles have been referred to asgender ide-
ologies(Hochschild, 1989). Atraditional
gender ideologymaintains that men’s sphere
is work and women’s sphere is the home.
The implicit assumption is that men have
greater power than women. Anegalitarian
gender ideologymaintains that power is dis-
tributed equally between women and men,
and women and men identify equally with
the same spheres. There could be an equal
emphasis on home, on work, or on some
combination of the two. Most people’s at-
titudes toward men’s and women’s roles lie
somewhere between traditional and egali-
tarian. Thus, Hochschild identified a third
gender ideology,transitional. A typical tran-
sitional attitude toward gender roles is that it
is acceptable for women to devote energy to
both work and family domains, but women
should hold proportionally more responsi-
bility for the home, and men should focus
proportionally more of their energy on work.
The most widely used instrument to
measure attitudes toward gender roles is the
Attitudes Toward Women Scale (ATWS;
Spence & Helmreich, 1972). The ATWS was
developed during the women’s movement of
the 1960s and assessed beliefs about the be-
havior of women and men in domains that
have traditionally been divided between
them, such as raising children, education,First, I examine research on attitudes
toward women’s and men’s roles, that
is, whether you believe women and men
should have distinct and separate roles
or whether you believe they should have
similar and equal roles. Then I review the
literature on the three components of at-
titudes toward the category gender: affect
(feelings), cognition (beliefs), and behav-
ior. People’s feelings toward gender are
described by the termsexism; people’s
beliefs about gender are referred to as
sex-roleorgender-role stereotypes;and
people’s behavior toward others based on
gender is known assex discrimination.
Attitudes Toward Men’s and Women’s Roles
Do you find it acceptable for women to work
outside the home? To be construction work-
ers (see Figure 3.1)? To serve in the military?
Is it acceptable for men to take the same
amount of time off from work as women
when a child is born? To stay home and take
care of children? If you find all these ideasFIGURE 3.1 A woman is using a compound
miter saw to cut wood for the interior of a house.M03_HELG0185_04_SE_C03.indd 68 6/21/11 12:21 PM