Assessing politicized gender identity: Validating the Feminist Consciousness Scale for men and women

ABSTRACT

Current measures of feminist identity are based on developmental models and cannot be used with men. We introduce and validate a new measure of feminist consciousness, the Feminist Consciousness Scale (FCS) which is based on dominant social psychological theories of politicized social identities, and assesses identity, injustice, and efficacy components of feminist consciousness. In three studies, the 8-item, two-factor FCS demonstrated excellent model fit and validity for college women and more age- and ideologically-heterogeneous men and women. We also established measurement invariance between men and women, meaning that the scale can be used with members of both groups. The FCS possesses several advantages over current measures of feminist identity based on developmental models: it is short and easy to use, can be used with both men and women, and is tied to the extensive literature on group consciousness and politicized social identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist identity
• politicized social identity
• activism
• feminist consciousness
• Feminist Consciousness Scale

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the hard work of the Smith College students who helped collect these data: Julie A. Colatrella, Olivia D’Angelo, Catherine V. Dodson, Sarah R. Dunn, Afton R. Hencky, Kelsey M. Hoffman, and Elizabeth Mincer. Thank you to Bill E. Peterson for comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/durjt/.

Open scholarship

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This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/durjt/.

Notes

1. See Appendix for a listing of some of the original ANES gender items.

2. As described below, a good model fit could not be established for the FICS, and thus we did not move on to the measurement invariance testing phase for this scale. Because model fit could not be established for the 23-item version of the FICS given to both men and women, the five scale scores were computed for women only using the full 33-item version of the scale.

3. An inspection of the modification indices pointed to additional possible re-specifications including adding covariances between sets of item errors within scales, but we decided not to implement these changes.

4. The fit was good for men and women separately as well.

5. Results for all known groups validity tests using the full scale in Study 2 had the same conclusions as the results for the subscales.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren E. Duncan

Lauren E. Duncan is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Smith College, in Northampton, MA. She received her Ph.D. in personality psychology and a graduate certificate in women's studies from the University of Michigan.

Randi L. Garcia

Randi L. Garcia is an Assistant Professor at Smith College, joint in Psychology and Statistical & Data Sciences. She earned a master’s degree in statistics and her PhD in social psychology at the University of Connecticut. She is also an ASA Accredited Professional Statistician.

Ilana Teitelman

Ilana Teitelman holds a BA and an MAT from Smith College. She currently works in the social services sector.