Spence, Janet (1923-)

[Page 625]A New Yorker cartoon in which a male character declares to a female companion that she is really stupid and he likes that in a woman launched Janet Taylor Spence's pioneering foray into gender research. Her 1972 study (with collaborator Robert Helmreich) titled “Who likes competent women?” led to the development of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS), which became the most frequently used measure of sexist beliefs. The AWS assesses beliefs that justify power differences between the sexes, including traditional notions about masculine superiority and the patriarchal family; attitudes toward equality of opportunity for women; and norms of “lady-like” behavior, such as modesty and deference toward men, that reflect a low-power, nonassertive interpersonal style. As Spence herself noted, however, the title of the scale is a misnomer because the AWS assesses attitudes about women's rights and roles, not attitudes toward women per se. In fact, research has shown that the AWS is not strongly correlated to overall positivity or negativity toward women as a group, but rather to traditional, prescriptive attitudes about gender roles.

Spence and Helmreich also developed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), which assesses two personality trait dimensions: instrumental (task-oriented traits related to agency) and expressive (interpersonally warm, nurturing, communal traits). Stereotypically, instrumental traits are associated with masculinity and expressive traits with femininity. Spence cautioned, however, that gender is a multifactorial construct, with instrumental and expressive traits constituting only one aspect of what people colloquially mean when they label self or others as masculine or feminine. Additionally, physical characteristics, role behaviors, and early identification with one's gender category all play into conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Spence's theoretical and empirical work provided a sophisticated counterweight to early gender researchers' constricted view of the gendered self-concept and gender stereotypes as wholly centered around the distinction between instrumental and expressive traits. In particular, she critiqued Sandra Bem's notion of psychological androgyny and, more broadly, Bem's gender schema theory, which relied on the expressive versus instrumental distinction as the core of gender identity and gendered perceptions of others.

Spence's AWS and PAQ have documented important shifts in social attitudes from the 1970s to the present time. AWS scores for both sexes show increasing egalitarianism about gender roles, although sex differences continue to persist, with women exhibiting consistently greater egalitarianism than men. The general increase in egalitarianism partly reflects ideological accommodation to women's influx into paid work, which has led to greater acceptance of instrumental traits among women. As a result, the PAQ has shown an increase in women's self-ratings on instrumentality over the decades in which it has been administered to student samples.