Predictors of women's sex role attitudes across two cultures

Abstract

The English Form of the Scale of Egalitarian Sex Role Attitudes (SESRA) was administered to 238 American women after the original Japanese Form was developed and administered to 420 Japanese women. The multiple regression analyses suggest that the most important common predicting variables of sex role attitudes for American and Japanese women are education (p<.01 and p<.0001 respectively) and professional/managerial work (p<.01 and p<.001 respectively). A highly educated woman with a career-oriented professional/managerial job is most likely to have an egalitarian sex role attitude. Moreover, an American woman with a job (clerical/semi-professional/self-employed: p<.05) tends to have a more egalitarian sex role attitude than a woman without one. However, for Japanese women, there is a significant difference in their sex role attitudes between women who hold a career-oriented professional/ managerial job and all other women, with or without a job. For Japanese women age (p< .05, negative correlation) serves as another, but weaker, predicting variable. Fertility (p<.05) and income (p<.05, negative correlation) are the parallel subordinate predicting variables for American women.

Egalitarian sex role attitudes among Japanese human service professionals: Confirmatory factor analytic study

“…This discrepancy may be attributed to the group of participants: the participants in the present study were professionals who are influenced by sex role egalitarianism in their working environment, whereas the participants enrolled in the studies of Suzuki, and Burt and Scott were non‐professionals 20,34 . Indeed Suzuki demonstrated that women in professional/managerial work had higher SESRA scores than others (housewives and those with jobs other than professional/managerial occupations) 29 . The previous findings that older people have less sex role egalitarianism may be outweighed by longer professional careers.…”

“…Compared to rural areas, there are varieties of women’s professions in urban areas. Participants in urban areas were more likely to have contact with professional women with strong egalitarian attitudes 29 . In contrast, in rural areas, the variety of women’s professions is limited.…”

“…In order to examine the construct validity of the SESRA‐S, Suzuki expected that higher scores of the measure would be obtained by women than by men, 4,21–26 by people with higher educational attainment, 27,28 by employed people than by unemployed people, 29 by younger people, 25,29–31 and by people who felt more flexible about the change of a women’s surname after marriage. All these expectations were confirmed 20 .…”

Television and the Cultivation of Gender-Role Attitudes in Japan: Does Television Contribute to the Maintenance of the Status Quo?

“…This study measured attitudes regarding gender roles using part of the Scale of Egalitarian Sex Role Attitudes (SESRA); Suzuki developed this scale to measure a Japanese person’s degree of egalitarianism in his or her attitudes to gender roles (A. Suzuki, 1991a, 1991b, 1997).…”

Rape Myth Scale: Factor structure and relationship with gender egalitarianism among Japanese professionals

“…The Scale of Egalitarian Sex Role Attitudes (SESRA) was developed by Suzuki to assess the degree ofegalitarianism in sex role attitudes 32 . An English version of this scale was introduced in the United States to examine cross‐cultural differences; the results of such studies have been previously reported 33,34 . The SESRA consists of 40 items measured on a Likert‐type 5‐point scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5).…”