TURKISH ADAPTATION OF THE GENDER ESSENTIALISM SCALE AND ITS PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES

Abstract

Gender essentialism refers to beliefs about innate, natural and fixed ‘essence’s that lead to fundamental differences between men and women. Since essentialist beliefs regarding social categories like gender relate to perceptions of and attitudes toward social inequalities, it is important for researchers to be able to measure such beliefs. The present research provides an adaptation of the Gender Essentialism Scale to Turkish and an examination of the psychometric properties of the Turkish scale. The scale has been translated into Turkish an used in three studies with university student samples (Study 1, n = 210; Study 2, n = 400; Study 3, n = 397). As expected, across all studies, gender essentialism was positively correlated with ambivalent sexism and both of its subscales (hostile and benevolent sexism). In two of the studies, in line with expectations, male participants scored higher on gender essentialism than female participants. Two items that had unacceptable factor loadings across all studies were removed from the scale. Results suggest that the Turkish version of the Gender Essentialism Scale can be used as a valid and reliable measure of gender essentialism. The adaptation of this measure to Turkish is expected to contribute to future studies on gender in Turkey. Keywords Gender essentialism, essentialism, validity, reliability