New scale measures Attitudes Toward Feminists.(Equal Pay Act)

Were students a decade ago more willing to accept feminists, and is a backlash on the rise? How can we tell? Dr. Cynthia Smith, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville IN, was surprised to find there was no way to measure.

In collaboration with colleagues and undergraduates, she set about to fill the gap. At the National Association of Women in Catholic Higher Education (NAWCHE) conference in June 2004, she described a new Attitudes Toward Feminists (ATF) scale and the collaboration that produced it.

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It began when she and Dr. Kim DeTardo, now at Marshall University, were teaching at Wheeling Jesuit University WV, where Smith directed the Women's Studies program. "We made the fateful mistake of admitting in class that we were feminists. Our students were horrified," she told WIHE.

That led DeTardo to organize a campus panel on feminism: "What Does the F-Word Mean?" University president Father George Lundy was the only male panelist to call himself a feminist. Others declared their support but thought feminists must be women.

Smith and DeTardo decided there was work to be done. Measuring student views turned out to be harder than they expected. "There are no other scales out there that measure people's attitudes or stereotypes of feminists," Smith told WIHE. Twenge and Zucker published one in 1999, focusing on definition and using open-ended questions. But there was no simple scale of attitudes.

Developing the scale