Chapter 7 Measuring Gender: Options and Issues Andrew P. Smiler and Marina Epstein Measuring Gender: Options and Issues In 1979, Carole Beere published an index of 235 gender-related measures. In her effort to update the volume a decade later, she reviewed over 1,400 measures (Beere, 1990a, 1990b). Although less than 10% of the newly published measures had been cited more than five times, the sheer volume of measures suggests that there is (or was) great interest in assessing gender-related phenomena, that there were many options for doing so, and that gender is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. The plethora of measures also suggests that there were substantial disagreements about measurement and that there were (likely) fractures in the field. This chapter emerges from a perspective that holds gender to be socially constructed, consistent with literature that has demonstrated changes in femininity and masculinity across times and places (Best & Williams, 1998; Gilmore, 1990; Kimmel, 1996; Smiler, Kay, & Harris, 2008; Twenge, 1997a, 1997b). Before we go further, we must clarify some terms. In this chapter, we use “sex” to refer to an individual’s biological status as female, male, or intersexual. We use the term “gender” to refer to a broad collection of personality characteristics, beliefs, and behaviors that are understood to be more “appropriate” for one sex than for the other (Unger, 1990). Gendered expectations are also applied to different “gender roles,” which specify what is normative and culturally “appropriate” behavior for men and women. Because the definitions of “masculinity” and “femininity” vary across scales, we do not offer a definition here. Moreover, we acknowledge that constructions of gender are necessarily culture-specific and cohort-specific, and illustrate dominant values that do not necessarily reflect individual differences. As most of the gender measures reviewed here have emerged from the Western world, this chapter largely reflects Western notions of masculinity and femininity, including the notion that there are only two genders (but see Herdt, 1994, for an alternate view). In this chapter, we review three different classes of measures that assess gender-related constructs, and we discuss measurement and conceptual issues that we believe the field must address. Within each class, we identify major foci, and provide a brief description of commonly used measures. We highlight measures that have had a substantial impact on gender studies or, among newer scales that we believe have the potential to have a substantial impact. We give preference to measures that have been used within the past 10 years and for which at least one psychometric analysis has been published (beyond the initial publication of the scale). In our review, we focus on the internal consistency (i.e., Cronbach’s alpha), reliability (i.e., the scale’s ability to produce replicable results) A.P. Smiler (B ) State University of New York, Oswego, NY, USA 133 J.C. Chrisler, D.R. McCreary (eds.), Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1465-1_7, C  Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010