Women as Managers Scale

Abstract

The Women as Managers Scale (WAMS) is a seminal psychometric instrument developed by Lawrence H. Peters, James R. Terborg, and Janet Taynor (1974) designed to systematically assess societal, organizational, and individual attitudes toward women occupying leadership and managerial roles. Conceptualized during a pivotal era of industrial-organizational psychology when affirmative action and sex discrimination legislation began reshaping corporate landscapes, the scale addresses the covert and overt gender stereotypes that hinder women’s career advancement. Comprising 21 items—11 worded favorably toward women in management and 10 worded unfavorably (reverse-scored)—the WAMS utilizes a 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Total scores span from 21 to 147, where higher scores signify more egalitarian, progressive, and favorable attitudes toward female executives.

Extensive psychometric evaluations have demonstrated that the WAMS possesses robust reliability and empirical validity. The initial instrument development relied on an odd-even split-half reliability coefficient of .91 across student and field samples, with subsequent studies reporting Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently between .85 and .93. Although early principal components analyses pointed toward a multi-factor structure representing managerial capabilities, feminine barriers, and acceptance in corporate hierarchies, the authors and subsequent psychometricians largely supported a unidimensional conceptualization due to substantial inter-factor correlations. Over five decades, the WAMS has served as an indispensable research benchmark across organizational psychology, management studies, and sociology, elucidating gender biases, predicting performance attributions, evaluating diversity initiatives, and tracing historical shifts in workplace equity.

Keywords

Women as Managers Scale, WAMS, gender stereotyping, managerial attitudes, leadership evaluation, gender bias, organizational psychology, role congruity theory, psychometrics, sex-role stereotypes, glass ceiling, managerial diversity.

Authors

The Women as Managers Scale was developed through a collaborative effort among prominent researchers in industrial and organizational psychology:

• Lawrence H. Peters, Ph.D.: Department of Management and Organizational Behavior, Texas Christian University / Purdue University. His research focused extensively on leadership behavior, performance evaluation, situational constraints in organizations, and psychological stereotyping in corporate environments.
• James R. Terborg, Ph.D.: Department of Management, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. An influential organizational behaviorist, Dr. Terborg contributed extensively to the literature on organizational socialization, female labor force participation, diversity, and motivation in task groups.
• Janet Taynor, Ph.D.: Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University. Dr. Taynor specialized in social psychology, attribution processes, and the empirical measurement of perceived equity and gender differences in institutional leadership.

Inquiries regarding the historical development and theoretical architecture of the scale are traditionally traced through archival records of the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology and the former JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Women as Managers Scale is to provide a standardized, objective, and psychometrically sound measure of individual attitudes, implicit biases, and cultural beliefs regarding the capability, appropriateness, and social acceptability of women holding supervisory, managerial, and top executive positions. Historically, the instrument emerged in response to the systemic underrepresentation of women in corporate management despite legislative advancements, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Equal Employment Opportunity mandates. Organizational theorists recognized that legal statutes alone could not dismantle discriminatory employment practices if decision-makers held entrenched, stereotyped assumptions regarding female emotionality, biological limitations, or cognitive inadequacies.

In applied organizational and clinical-consulting contexts, the WAMS fulfills several diagnostic and interventional functions:

• Needs Assessment for Diversity Interventions: Organizations deploy the scale to evaluate baseline attitudes among employees, managers, and executives prior to designing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs. Post-intervention assessments allow practitioners to determine whether educational programs yield measurable shifts in implicit and explicit gender stereotypes.
• Selection and Succession Analysis: While ethical considerations preclude using the WAMS as an individual screening device for hiring or promotion, corporate consultants utilize aggregated WAMS data within specific departments to diagnose hostile work climates, identify microclimates of traditional gender-role orthodoxy, and predict systemic attrition among high-potential female managers.
• Cross-Cultural and Longitudinal Research: The scale enables comparative inquiries evaluating how national cultures, religious orientations, and socio-economic developmental phases impact perceptions of female authority. Longitudinal tracking allows organizational sociologists to observe cultural shifts across generations of undergraduate business students and incoming executives.
• Attribution and Performance Appraisal Research: Academic researchers utilize the WAMS to demonstrate how evaluators’ baseline attitudes mediate the attribution of female success or failure. Evaluators with traditional (low) WAMS scores systematically attribute a female executive’s success to luck or ease of task, whereas high-scoring evaluators attribute identical outcomes to stable managerial competence and effort.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the WAMS is a multi-layered attitudinal composite that reflects cognitive schemas, affective evaluations, and behavioral predispositions toward female managerial authority. Grounded in social-cognitive attitude theory, the scale captures the degree to which an individual views leadership as an exclusively masculine preserve versus a role open to merit-based gender equality. This overarching construct encompasses three closely related psychological dimensions:

1. Acceptance of Women in Executive and Managerial Roles

This core dimension evaluates normative beliefs regarding whether society, corporate boards, and organizational hierarchies should legitimately accept women as decision-makers and competitive peers. It taps into egalitarian principles and political support for equal opportunity. Illustrative items examine whether women should compete for top executive positions (Item 10) and whether society should attribute equal value to the work generated by female managers compared to their male counterparts (Item 9). Individuals scoring high on this dimension display low levels of traditional sex-role ideology and actively endorse institutional parity.

2. Perceived Managerial Capabilities and Instrumental Traits

Leadership literature has historically characterized managerial archetypes through “agentic” or instrumental traits—such as emotional detachment, objective reasoning, assertiveness, self-confidence, and competitiveness. This dimension measures whether respondents ascribe these necessary functional capabilities to women. Specific items examine whether women possess the objectivity required to evaluate complex business transactions (Item 2), whether they can master mathematical and mechanical systems (Item 16), and whether they can exert assertiveness and aggression in high-stakes negotiations (Items 18 and 21). Low scores indicate the persistence of the stereotypical belief that women are inherently too passive, emotional, or mathematically deficient to lead organizations effectively.

3. Biological, Familial, and Physiological Constraints

This subtle dimension addresses systemic patriarchal stereotypes rooted in biological determinism and domestic division of labor. It examines whether biological phenomena—specifically pregnancy (Item 11) and menstruation (Item 13)—are perceived as disabling conditions that reduce workplace desirability and executive reliability. Furthermore, it probes traditional family-role mandates, assessing whether a mother who works outside the home is viewed as deficient compared to one who remains at home full-time (Item 15), and whether managerial success inevitably compromises female femininity (Item 14). Rejection of these biases reflects a progressive cognitive separation between a woman’s biological/familial identity and her professional agency.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Women as Managers Scale is rooted in several foundational paradigms of social psychology and organizational behavior, particularly theories concerning social roles, stereotyping, and attribution.

Social Role Theory and Role Congruity Theory

Foremost among these is Alice Eagly’s Social Role Theory and the subsequently developed Role Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Social Role Theory posits that historical divisions of labor create pervasive sex-differentiated stereotypes: women are culturally associated with communal qualities (e.g., nurturance, warmth, emotional expressiveness), whereas men are associated with agentic attributes (e.g., assertiveness, independence, decisive competitiveness). When applied to leadership contexts, prejudice occurs because the traditional managerial stereotype aligns heavily with agentic, masculine characteristics—a phenomenon famously termed the “Think Manager – Think Male” effect by Virginia Schein (1973).

The WAMS operationalizes this perceived incongruity. When a woman occupies or aspires to a leadership role, she confronts two distinct forms of prejudice: (a) being perceived as possessing less leadership capability than men because leadership traits are stereotyped as masculine, and (b) having her leadership behavior evaluated less favorably because enacting decisive, agentic authority violates social prescriptions regarding female communal behavior. Items in the WAMS directly measure the respondent’s adherence to this incongruity schema.

Attribution Theory

The theoretical framework of the WAMS also draws heavily from Fritz Heider’s and Bernard Weiner’s Attribution Theory. When observers interpret the performance of an individual, they attribute outcomes either to internal factors (ability, effort) or external factors (luck, task difficulty, bias). Groundbreaking research by Garland and Price (1977) utilized the WAMS to demonstrate that an evaluator’s generalized attitude toward female managers serves as an antecedent cognitive filter. Evaluators harboring negative attitudes toward women managers (low WAMS scores) consistently discount a successful woman’s achievements by attributing them to luck or affirmative action favoritism, whereas high-scoring individuals attribute identical outcomes to stable internal competence.

Validity

The construct, predictive, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Women as Managers Scale have been subjected to rigorous empirical testing across both laboratory experiments and organizational field investigations.

Construct and Criterion-Related Validity

During the initial validation phase, Peters, Terborg, and Taynor (1974) formulated six explicit theoretical hypotheses to establish criterion-related validity. Testing these predictions across academic and industrial samples yielded compelling empirical confirmation:

• Gender Differences: In alignment with self-interest and social identity theories, female respondents scored significantly higher (displaying more favorable attitudes toward female managers) than male respondents across both undergraduate and corporate cohorts ($p < .001$).
• Maternal Employment: The authors hypothesized that participants whose mothers worked outside the home would hold more egalitarian attitudes. While this was confirmed for male respondents, it did not achieve statistical significance for female participants, representing the only unconfirmed original hypothesis.
• Educational Level and Major: Business and engineering majors held significantly more conservative attitudes toward female managers than humanities and social science majors, consistent with the demographic conservatism of traditional professional schools in the 1970s.
• Contact Hypothesis / Work Exposure: Employees who had worked under the direct supervision of a female manager exhibited significantly more positive WAMS scores than those without cross-gender managerial contact ($p < .05$), providing strong support for the contact hypothesis of prejudice reduction.

Predictive and Convergent Validity

Subsequent psychometric investigations have affirmed the predictive validity of the scale. Garland and Price (1977) demonstrated that the WAMS accounted for significant variance in organizational decision-making simulations, successfully predicting performance appraisal ratings, promotion recommendations, and attributional patterns toward female subordinates. Convergent validity has been established through moderate-to-strong positive correlations ($r = .55$ to $.72$) with related psychometric instruments, such as the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) developed by Spence and Helmreich, and modern measures of modern sexism and Neosexism (Tougas et al., 1995).

Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal stability of the Women as Managers Scale have been corroborated by multiple independent investigations spanning several decades.

Internal Consistency

In the original scale construction study, Peters et al. (1974) established an odd-even corrected split-half reliability coefficient of .91 based on their primary undergraduate sample ($N = 541$). In their cross-validation sample consisting of 280 corporate employees (180 men and 100 women) working for an international distribution firm, the internal consistency remained exceptionally stable, yielding a split-half coefficient of .89 for male employees and .92 for female employees.

Subsequent investigations employing Cronbach’s coefficient alpha confirmed these results. Terborg et al. (1977) reported overall alpha reliabilities ranging from .88 to .93. Even when translated and adapted across diverse international contexts—such as China (Barnes, 2007), Turkey, and Latin America—the composite 21-item scale consistently yields alpha coefficients exceeding the conventional psychometric threshold of .80, regularly demonstrating values between .85 and .91.

Test-Retest Stability

Studies evaluating temporal stability over 2-week to 6-week test-retest intervals have demonstrated stability coefficients ranging from $r = .79$ to $r = .86$ in control cohorts who received no bias-mitigation interventions. This confirms that the WAMS measures enduring cognitive schemas rather than transient affective states.

Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the WAMS has been a central topic of psychometric dialogue within organizational psychology, centering on the choice between a global unidimensional model and an interpretable three-factor solution.

Initial Scale Reduction and Factor Extraction

The scale development began with an expansive pool of 55 items reflecting general managerial behaviors, gender-role stereotypes, and organizational demands. Following preliminary item-total correlation analysis, items exhibiting poor discrimination or ambiguous loadings were discarded, resulting in a refined 21-item instrument. Peters et al. (1974) conducted an initial Principal Components Analysis (PCA) with orthogonal varimax rotation, which yielded three distinct factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0:

• Factor 1: General Acceptance and Managerial Capabilities (accounting for the largest share of common variance, typified by Items 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 19).
• Factor 2: Biological and Feminine Barriers (comprising items relating to pregnancy, menstruation, mothering duties, and sacrifice of femininity: Items 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15).
• Factor 3: Managerial Traits and Interpersonal Assertiveness (comprising items reflecting competitive drive, ambition, aggression, and mathematical aptitude: Items 1, 3, 6, 7, 16, 17, 18, 20, and 21).

Dimensionality Debates: Crino et al. (1981)

Despite the three-factor mathematical solution, Peters and colleagues recommended utilizing the scale as a single composite index, noting that the primary factor accounted for the vast majority of explained variance and that individual factors exhibited inter-correlations ranging from .50 to .68. However, Crino, White, and DeSanctis (1981) published a critical re-examination in the Academy of Management Journal. Their confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that treating the WAMS as strictly unidimensional obscured important nuance; specific demographic predictors correlated differentially with the distinct sub-dimensions. While the general composite remains dominant in practical assessments, contemporary psychometricians frequently compute both the 21-item global score and the three subscale scores for structural equation modeling (SEM) applications.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Scale Name: Women as Managers Scale (WAMS)
• Target Population: Working adults, corporate managers, human resource personnel, and undergraduate/graduate students in business, psychology, and organizational sciences.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil self-report or computer-administered survey.
• Completion Time: Approximately 7 to 10 minutes.
• Total Number of Items: 21 items (11 positively worded, 10 negatively worded).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert response scale scored as follows:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Slightly Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Disagree nor Agree
  • 5 = Slightly Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring and Transformation Rules:
  • Directly Scored Items: Items 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 19 are scored directly from 1 to 7.
  • Reverse-Scored Items: Items 1, 3, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, and 21 must be inverted prior to aggregation using the transformation formula: $$\text{Item}_{\text{reversed}} = 8 – \text{Raw Response}$$ (i.e., $1 \rightarrow 7$, $2 \rightarrow 6$, $3 \rightarrow 5$, $4 \rightarrow 4$, $5 \rightarrow 3$, $6 \rightarrow 2$, $7 \rightarrow 1$).
  • Composite Score Range: Sum of all 21 items yields a total score ranging from 21 to 147. Alternatively, researchers frequently compute the mean item score ranging from 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Score Interpretation: Higher numerical values reflect more positive, egalitarian attitudes toward women in managerial positions; lower values reflect conservative, stereotypical biases against female organizational leadership.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Women as Managers Scale was officially published in 1974 by Lawrence H. Peters, James R. Terborg, and Janet Taynor via the JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology (Manuscript No. 585), followed by comprehensive field analyses published in the Academy of Management Journal (Terborg et al., 1977). As an academic instrument originating from grant-funded and unclassified university research published over 50 years ago, the WAMS is situated within the public domain for non-commercial academic, educational, and scientific research purposes.

No royalty fees or formal copyright permissions are required for standard academic usage, thesis dissertations, or classroom demonstrations, provided that the original authors and foundational publications are properly cited in accordance with standard APA guidelines. Commercial organizations or consulting firms deploying the instrument within proprietary diagnostic software or fee-for-service management audits should ensure ethical compliance, standard fair-use acknowledgement, and data confidentiality.

References

• Barnes, J. (2007). Women leaders in China: A comparative study of the influence of culture on leadership characteristics of Chinese, Chinese-American, and American women in China (Doctoral dissertation, Indiana Wesleyan University). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
• Crino, M. D., White, M. C., & DeSanctis, G. L. (1981). A comment on the dimensionality and reliability of the Women as Managers Scale (WAMS). Academy of Management Journal, 24(4), 866–876. https://doi.org/10.5465/256184
• Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109(3), 573–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573
• Garland, H., & Price, K. H. (1977). Attitudes toward women in management and attributions for their success and failure in a managerial position. Journal of Applied Psychology, 62(1), 29–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.62.1.29
• Meyer, B. (2003). Attitudes toward women in church leadership positions (Doctoral dissertation, Alliant International University, Los Angeles). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
• Peters, L. H., Terborg, J. R., & Taynor, J. (1974). Women as Managers Scale (WAMS): A measure of attitudes toward women in management positions. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 4, 134 (Ms. No. 585).
• Schein, V. E. (1973). The relationship between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics. Journal of Applied Psychology, 57(2), 95–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037130
• Terborg, J. R., Peters, L. H., Ilgen, D. R., & Smith, F. (1977). Organizational and personal correlates of attitudes toward women as managers. Academy of Management Journal, 20(1), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.5465/255464
• Tougas, F., Brown, R., Beaton, A. M., & Joly, S. (1995). Neosexism: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(8), 842–849. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167295218007

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)