Abstract

As gender studies have been flourishing in Korea in the past 10 years, the themes as well as the scope of the study have been also expanding. However, adequate instruments for assessing people's attitudes toward women or gender equality had been lacking. Many studies look at the aspect of gender role consciousness in order to diagnose the state of people's awareness of women-related issues and to lay a foundation for developing policy measures to solve women's issues. Due to the absence of measurement tools with proven reliability and validity, as well as cultural relevancy, most of these studies employ scales imported from abroad. Employing scales developed in countries with different cultural norms and customs in relation to gender behavior can pose many problems. For instance, scales such as BSRI(Bem Sex Role Inventory, by Bem, 1974) and SRES(Sex Role Egalitarianism Scale, King & King, 1983) do not deal with issues such as boy preference and married women's relationship with in-laws having significant implications for the lives of women in Korea because of the patriarchal family system. Noting this problem, it is also common for researchers to make up a scale by him/herself and use it without adequate validation processes. In this context, KWDI launched a research project develope the Korean Gender Egalitarianism Scale(KGES), aiming to capture uniqueness of relationship between women and men in Korea. First, the concept of gender egalitarianism was defined and then a theoretical framework or structure for the scale was formulated. Three preliminary surveys were conducted for the construction and review of items as well as for a pilot testing of the scale. Two main surveys were conducted, on the general public(N=1,627) and members of women's organizations, for the purpose of validating the scale as well as of securing the norms. The complete version of the KGES consists of 80 items in four life domains(family, work, education, and culture). The reliability scores(Cronbach α) for the whole scale was .9461 for the general public(men and women), .9347 for women, .9314 for men, and .9643 for the members of women's organizations.