Double Standard Scale

Abstract

The Double Standard Scale (DSS) is a foundational, psychometrically validated psychometric instrument designed to evaluate endorsement and internalized acceptance of the traditional sexual double standard (SDS). Developed by Sandra L. Caron, Clive M. Davis, William A. Halteman, and Marla Stickle in 1993, the DSS assesses the pervasive socio-cultural norm that grants men greater sexual latitude, permissiveness, and agency while concurrently prescribing modesty, passivity, and reputational sanction for equivalent sexual conduct among women. Composed of 10 self-report items administered on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Agree) to 5 (Strongly Disagree), the instrument captures essential behavioral, relational, and prescriptive expectations surrounding premarital sexual experience, sexual initiation, proactive contraceptive preparedness, and erotic dominance. Summed total scores range from 10 to 50, with lower scores quantitatively reflecting higher adherence to patriarchal sexual double standards after reverse-scoring item 8. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate sound internal consistency, with an initial Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .72 in collegiate populations, which has shown stable reliability estimates (.70 to .82) across diverse longitudinal and cross-sectional replications. Empirical investigations substantiate the scale’s construct, convergent, and predictive validities, demonstrating robust negative associations with female sexual assertiveness, preventative health behaviors such as proactive condom acquisition and carrying, and open interpersonal communication regarding sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Over the past three decades, the DSS has served as an indispensable empirical tool across social psychology, public health, gender studies, and sexological research, illuminating how asymmetric sexual scripts elevate vulnerability to sexual health risks, reinforce sexual stigma, and perpetuate gender inequality in contemporary intimate relationships.

Keywords

Double Standard Scale, sexual double standard, gender roles, sexual scripts, sexual health, condom negotiation, sexual attitudes, psychometrics, Sandra L. Caron, sexology

Authors

The Double Standard Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in human development, family studies, sexology, and applied biostatistics:

• Sandra L. Caron, Ph.D. — Professor of Family Relations and Human Sexuality, College of Education and Human Development, University of Maine, Orono, ME, United States. Correspondence: [email protected].
• Clive M. Davis, Ph.D. — Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, United States.
• William A. Halteman, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Maine, Orono, ME, United States.
• Marla Stickle, M.S. — Researcher in Human Development and Family Studies, University of Maine, Orono, ME, United States.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Double Standard Scale is to provide researchers, sociologists, clinical psychologists, and public health educators with an efficient, reliable, and standardized operational measure of individual endorsement of traditional sexual double standards. For centuries, Western cultural scripts have sustained a dual framework regarding erotic conduct: masculine sexuality is socially rewarded, framed as an inevitable biological imperative, and aligned with conquest and technical mastery; conversely, feminine sexuality is policed, bounded by domestic virtue, pathologized when proactive, and stigmatized when expressed outside committed emotional confines. Caron, Davis, Halteman, and Stickle (1993) engineered the DSS to empirically quantify the extent to which modern individuals internalize these normative asymmetries.

Beyond theoretical inquiries into sociosexual attitudes, the development of the DSS was fundamentally driven by applied sexual health concerns—specifically, escalating epidemics of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted infections among young adults during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The authors recognized that cognitive endorsement of gendered double standards directly impairs preventative health interventions. For example, when women internalize the belief that carrying condoms or explicitly preparing for sexual intercourse signals promiscuity or moral failure (e.g., DSS Item 3: “A woman should never appear to be prepared for a sexual encounter” and Item 8: “It is acceptable for a woman to carry condoms”), they are systematically discouraged from acquiring, carrying, and insisting upon barrier protection. Consequently, the scale serves as an indispensable diagnostic and investigative tool for evaluating barriers to safer sex practices, sexual decision-making, and barrier contraception utilization.

In clinical, educational, and intervention contexts, the DSS is widely implemented to:

• Assess baseline levels of patriarchal sexual role adherence among young adults, university cohorts, and community samples prior to sexual health education or gender-equity interventions.
• Track longitudinal transformations in sexual attitudes across demographic shifts, cultural transitions, and therapeutic interventions focused on sexual assertiveness.
• Examine the etiology of sexual dysfunction, relational dissatisfaction, and coercive sexual dynamics, where rigid adherence to dominance-passivity scripts (DSS Item 7) hinders equitable communication, authentic desire expression, and mutual consent negotiation.
• Elucidate gender disparities in reputation tracking, such as slut-shaming, peer victimization, and relational policing among emerging adults.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the DSS is the traditional sexual double standard (SDS). Psychologically, the SDS reflects a cognitive schema and value system that applies disparate moral, social, and behavioral criteria to evaluate identical sexual conduct depending on the gender of the actor. The DSS captures this overarching construct through several interrelated, multifaceted behavioral and attitudinal dimensions:

1. Asymmetric Evaluation of Sexual Permissiveness and Promiscuity

A core facet of the construct is the differential moral sanction imposed on casual or multiple partner sexual encounters. Under this schema, casual sexual experimentation is construed as normative, developmental, and praiseworthy for men, but as morally degrading and disqualifying for women. DSS Item 5 (“A ‘good’ woman would never have a one-night stand, but it is expected of a man”) and Item 9 (“It is worse for a woman to sleep around than it is for a man”) operationalize this evaluative cleavage, tapping into the historic Madonna-whore dichotomy that bifurcates women into categories of respectability versus sexual availability.

2. Disparate Valuation of Sexual Experience and Competence

The construct posits that sexual competence and prior experience enhance masculine social status while eroding feminine relationship desirability. Men are socially mandated to accumulate multiple partners as an index of prowess, whereas women are expected to display relative naivety and lower lifetime partner numbers. This dimension is measured by DSS Item 1 (“It is expected that a woman be less sexually experienced than her partner”), Item 2 (“A woman who is sexually active is less likely to be considered a desirable partner”), Item 4 (“It is important that the men be sexually experienced so as to teach the women”), and Item 6 (“It is important for a man to have multiple sexual experiences in order to gain experience”). Within this framework, sexual instruction is unidirectional, cementing male instructional authority within heterosexual encounters.

3. Scripted Erotic Dominance versus Passivity

The construct extends directly into interpersonal behavioral roles during erotic encounters, emphasizing that agency, initiation, and control rightfully belong to men, whereas receptivity, deference, and submissiveness are mandated for women. DSS Item 7 (“In sex the man should take the dominant role and the woman should assume the passive role”) and Item 10 (“It is up to the man to initiate sex”) capture adherence to this hierarchical dynamic. Cognitive adherence to erotic passivity strips women of perceived legitimacy in modulating the pace, boundaries, and nature of sexual activity.

4. Sanctioning of Contraceptive Preparedness

Perhaps the most clinically significant dimension within Caron et al.’s formulation is the explicit social sanctioning of female sexual anticipation and proactive contraceptive responsibility. For a woman, planning for sexual activity compromises the socially demanded defense of “spontaneous passion” or “swept-away innocence.” Items reflecting this dimension include DSS Item 3 (“A woman should never appear to be prepared for a sexual encounter”) and Item 8 (“It is acceptable for a woman to carry condoms”, reverse-scored). Endorsement of this facet manifests behaviorally as an aversion to carrying condoms or taking oral contraceptives, as doing so constitutes premeditation, exposing the individual to severe social penalties and accusations of promiscuity.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Double Standard Scale is firmly anchored in Social Script Theory, originally formulated by sociologists John H. Gagnon and William Simon (1973; Simon & Gagnon, 1986). Sexual scripting theory posits that human sexual behavior is not an instinctual, purely biological drive, but rather a profoundly socialized, symbolically mediated performance governed by structured cognitive templates or “scripts.” These scripts operate across three distinct yet interacting levels:

• Cultural Scenarios: Broad societal-level prescriptions, values, institutional instructions, and mass media portrayals that dictate who does what to whom, when, where, and for what underlying motives. The traditional sexual double standard represents an overarching cultural scenario in patriarchal societies.
• Interpersonal Scripts: The contextual adaptation of cultural scenarios to concrete relational encounters, wherein actors negotiate behavioral roles, subtle cues, turn-taking, and reciprocal sexual expectations.
• Intrapsychic Scripts: The internalization of cultural and interpersonal scripts into an individual’s private cognitive architecture, fantasies, desires, self-evaluations, and behavioral self-regulation.

The DSS operationalizes the degree to which individuals have internalized these patriarchal cultural scenarios into their intrapsychic scripts. Under the traditional script, male sexual appetite is cast as spontaneous, biologically overwhelming, and achievement-oriented, while female sexuality is framed as relational, reactive, and emotional. Consequently, sexual initiation, technical orchestration, and dominance naturally devolve onto the male partner, while the female partner is scripted as a gatekeeper whose social value depends entirely on resisting male advances or surrendering only under circumstances of perceived emotional attachment or spontaneous lack of premeditation.

Furthermore, the DSS integrates concepts from Social Role Theory (Eagly, 1987) and Status Characteristics Theory (Berger et al., 1977). According to social role theory, historical gender divisions of labor generate prescriptive and descriptive behavioral expectations (gender roles). When these roles infiltrate intimate spheres, men are attributed high agentic competence (assertive, knowledgeable, dominant), while women are confined to communal and passive roles. Violations of these prescriptive expectations—such as a woman exhibiting high sexual experience or carrying barrier methods—elicit social backlash, interpersonal condemnation, and moral devaluation. The DSS psychometrically tracks the persistence of these gendered role expectations within the domain of human intimacy.

Validity

Empirical evaluations of the Double Standard Scale provide compelling evidence for its construct, convergent, predictive, and discriminant validities across diverse demographic cohorts.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was initially established through convergent correlations with established measures of sex-role egalitarianism, traditional gender ideology, and sexual conservatism. Caron et al. (1993) demonstrated that higher adherence to the traditional double standard (lower overall DSS scores) correlated significantly with traditional attitudes on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1978) and measures of generalized sexual guilt and conservatism. Individuals who endorse traditional gender roles in economic and domestic spheres also reliably endorse double standards within the bedroom, supporting the theoretical interconnectedness of macro-level gender ideology and micro-level sexual scripts.

Predictive and Behavioral Validity

The primary clinical strength of the DSS lies in its predictive validity regarding actual health-protective behaviors, specifically condom use and sexual assertiveness. In the seminal study by Caron et al. (1993) involving 330 first-year college undergraduates, scores on the DSS were highly predictive of distinct condom-related behaviors among both men and women:

• Women endorsing a strong double standard were significantly less likely to carry condoms, significantly less likely to suggest condom use to a male partner, and reported elevated anxiety regarding being perceived as “promiscuous” or “too experienced” if they introduced barrier contraception.
• Men adhering to the double standard reported viewing women who carry condoms as less suitable for long-term romantic partnerships, while concurrently viewing them as readily available for uncommitted sexual encounters.
• Higher double standard adherence systematically predicted lower rates of consistent condom utilization during intercourse, even after controlling for generalized sexual experience, age, and relationship status.

Subsequent investigations have expanded these predictive linkages, demonstrating that women with high double standard endorsement exhibit significantly lower levels of sexual communication, diminished capacity for sexual assertiveness (e.g., refusing unwanted sexual advances), and heightened susceptibility to sexual compliance under peer or partner pressure.

Known-Groups Validity

The DSS consistently demonstrates known-groups validity across gender cohorts. Across nearly all published literature utilizing the DSS, male respondents score significantly lower than female respondents (indicating stronger endorsement of the double standard among men). Men derive structural and status benefits from the traditional standard—which condones their partner accumulation while licensing sexual dominance—leading to higher endorsement. Conversely, women, who bear the punitive reputational and health costs of the standard, systematically score higher on the DSS (indicating greater rejection of the double standard), although significant intra-gender variation persists based on religious orthodoxy, cultural background, and political conservatism.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Double Standard Scale has been substantiated through rigorous assessments of internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse populations.

Internal Consistency

In the original validation investigation conducted by Caron, Davis, Halteman, and Stickle (1993) with a normative sample of N = 330 university students (168 women, 162 men), the instrument exhibited an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .72 for the summed 10-item scale. In psychometric scale development, an alpha between .70 and .80 is considered satisfactory and optimal for a brief, 10-item unidimensional or quasi-unidimensional screening tool, minimizing item redundancy while preserving construct breadth.

Subsequent empirical studies utilizing the DSS have corroborated these internal consistency metrics, typically reporting Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from .70 to .82:

• Caron and Carter (1995) observed an alpha of .74 in an independent collegiate cohort assessing risk factors for HIV transmission.
• Replications in diverse geographic regions across North America and Western Europe have yielded internal consistency coefficients consistently meeting or exceeding the .70 threshold.
• Item-total correlations across the items generally range from .35 to .62, with Item 8 (condom carrying) occasionally demonstrating lower item-total correlation due to shifts in public health campaigns normalizing condom distribution, yet remaining essential for predictive validity regarding sexual health.

Test-Retest Stability

Stability assessments over brief intervals (2 to 4 weeks) indicate robust test-retest reliability (Pearson’s r ranging from .78 to .85), indicating that cognitive scripts regarding gendered sexual conduct function as relatively stable cognitive traits in the absence of targeted educational, clinical, or cultural interventions.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Double Standard Scale has been investigated using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across numerous empirical studies.

Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA)

In the original instrument design by Caron et al. (1993), principal components analysis with varimax rotation suggested that while the DSS operates effectively as a single composite index of traditional double standard adherence, the items naturally cluster around two tightly coupled underlying dimensions:

• Factor 1: Sexual Experience and Promiscuity Sanctions — Encompassing Items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 9. This factor accounts for the largest proportion of total variance (typically 28% to 35%) and reflects the core ideological tenet that sexual experience elevates male status while debasing female worth. High-loading items include Item 5 (loadings often > .65) and Item 9 (loadings > .70).
• Factor 2: Erotic Dominance and Behavioral Preparedness — Encompassing Items 3, 7, 8, and 10. This factor accounts for approximately 12% to 16% of additional variance and reflects prescriptive behavioral choreography within sexual interactions: male initiation, male dominance, female passivity, and the prohibition of female contraceptive planning. Item 7 and Item 10 exhibit high primary loadings (> .60) on this dimension.

Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) and Fit Indices

Subsequent psychometric examinations using modern structural equation modeling frameworks have evaluated whether a unidimensional model or a correlated two-factor model provides superior fit to empirical data. Confirmatory factor analytic investigations report the following typical parameters:

• Unidimensional Model: Demonstrates acceptable to good global fit when error covariances between syntactically parallel items (e.g., between Item 4 and Item 6 regarding male sexual experience) are accounted for: RMSEA = .058 to .068; Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .91 to .94; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .89 to .92; Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) < .055.
• Correlated Two-Factor Model: Yields superior model fit indices: RMSEA = .042 to .051; CFI = .96 to .97; TLI = .95 to .96; with an inter-factor correlation typically exceeding r = .65, justifying Caron et al.’s recommendation of summing all 10 items into a single, parsimonious composite total score for most applied research applications.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications, administrative characteristics, and scoring protocols for the Double Standard Scale are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Double Standard Scale (DSS)
• Primary Authors: Sandra L. Caron, Clive M. Davis, William A. Halteman, and Marla Stickle
• Year of Development: 1993
• Assessment Format: 10-item self-report questionnaire
• Target Population: Emerging adults, university students, and adult populations (adolescent adaptations require reading level adjustments)
• Administration Modality: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, web-based digital survey, or computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI)
• Completion Duration: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Response Continuum: 5-point Likert scale formatted as:
  • 1 = Strongly Agree
  • 2 = Agree
  • 3 = Undecided
  • 4 = Disagree
  • 5 = Strongly Disagree
• Scoring Protocol and Directionality:
  • Standard Scoring: Item scores are summed across all 10 items.
  • Reverse Scoring: Item 8 (“It is acceptable for a woman to carry condoms”) is worded pro-egalitarianly and must be reverse-scored prior to summing: (1 = 5, 2 = 4, 3 = 3, 4 = 2, 5 = 1).
  • Score Range: Total composite scores range from 10 to 50.
  • Interpretation: In accordance with the original scoring scheme established by Caron et al. (1993), lower total scores indicate greater adherence to the traditional sexual double standard, whereas higher total scores indicate rejection of the double standard and greater sexual egalitarianism.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Double Standard Scale was developed and initially published in 1993 in the peer-reviewed periodical The Journal of Sex Research. In accordance with standard psychometric and academic publishing conventions, the instrument was placed into the public scientific domain for scholarly, educational, and clinical research use. There are no commercial royalty fees or licensing costs required for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical use, or clinical assessment.

Researchers intending to employ the DSS are expected to properly cite the foundational validation publication (Caron et al., 1993) in all published reports, presentations, and theses. For commercial applications, proprietary survey platforms, or substantial instrument modifications, permissions and inquiries should be directed to the corresponding author, Dr. Sandra L. Caron, College of Education and Human Development, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469 (e-mail: [email protected]).

References

• Berger, J., Fisek, M. H., Norman, R. Z., & Zelditch, M. (1977). Status characteristics and social interaction: An expectation-states approach. Elsevier Scientific Publishing.
• Caron, S. L., & Carter, D. B. (1995). The relationship among sex role orientation, sexual double standard, and condom use among college students. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 7(3), 43–57. https://doi.org/10.1300/J056v07n03_03
• Caron, S. L., Davis, C. M., Halteman, W. A., & Stickle, M. (1993). Predictors of condom-related behaviors among first-year college students. The Journal of Sex Research, 30(3), 252–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499309551709
• Davis, C. M., Yarber, W. L., Bauserman, R., Schreer, G., & Davis, S. L. (Eds.). (1998). Handbook of sexuality-related measures. Sage Publications.
• Eagly, A. H. (1987). Sex differences in social behavior: A social-role interpretation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973). Sexual conduct: The social sources of human sexuality. Aldine Publishing.
• Simon, W., & Gagnon, J. H. (1986). Sexual scripts: Permanence and change. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15(2), 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542219
• Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. (1978). Masculinity and femininity: Their psychological dimensions, correlates, and antecedents. University of Texas Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)