Gender Role Attitude of University Students: A Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Measures

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine gender role attitude of university students who are studying in fields that are traditional to women (social science) and nontraditional to women (mathematics and physics). Specifically, the study tried to examine the influences of variables like sex, fields of study and years spent at university on gender role attitude. A cross-sectional survey was used as a research design. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 130 students from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) and College of Natural and Computational Sciences (CNCS) located at Haramaya University main campus. Implicit and explicit measures were used to examine traditional gender role attitude. Percentage, Chi-Square test, one-sample t-test, independent sample t-test, and one-way ANOVA were employed as data analysis techniques. Contrary to what has been hypothesized, the results of the study revealed that participants had a traditional gender role attitude. The implicit test result also showed that a significantly higher number of participants (more than 90%) associated men to Doctor and Engineer than associating women to these professions. As hypothesized, female participants had significantly lower traditional gender role attitude mean score compared to their male counterparts. Moreover, the result showed no statistically significant differences among groups’ means for the first year, third year, and students from CNCS as determined by one-way ANOVA. It is concluded that college education in general and training in Gender and Development (GAD) field, in particular, had little influence in changing traditional gender role attitude of the participants.