Women’s irrational beliefs about traditional feminine sex role stereotypes with the Multi-cultural version of the O’ Kelly Women Beliefs Scale

To explore variation in the content of women’s beliefs about traditional feminine sex role stereotypes, we ran a confirmatory factor analysis on data from a multi-national sample of 1643 women who completed the 30-item Multi-cultural version of the O’Kelly Women Beliefs Scale. Analyses testing whether the data best conformed to a one- or a three-factor structure found that both models appeared to fit the data equally well. To further explore if distinguishing between different domains of irrational beliefs yielded greater explanatory power, we ran an additional exploratory factor analysis. Results showed that there were differences in the relative mount of variance explained by each of the three content areas initially included in the original version of the instrument; work and profession, love and sex, and self-sacrifice and victimization. The work and profession content area accounted for a larger percentage of the variance (33.41%) relative to the other subscales. Results were explained in terms of the relative influence of multi-national changes in the number of women joining the workforce over the past several decades.