Amanda Barbour, Sarah Canovaca, Lana Davis, & Melinda Liddell (2001)

Fifty-six Sweet Briar students completed our study. You first took the IEEI questionnaire (Impact of Environment on Empowerment Inventory).  This allowed us to place you in groups of empowered, neutral, and non-empowered members. Half of you received a story about a female police officer, and the other half received one involving a male police officer. The responses on the PEA questionnaire (Perception and Evaluation of Authority) allowed us to compare postive and negative evaluations of the authority figure based on gender. We then related those scores with the level of empowerment demonstrated through the IEEI scores. The final GAM questionnaire (Gender of Authority Measure) measured your explicit attitudes toward gender of authority figures; your previously held beliefs. Out of 56 participants, there were no non-empowered scores. Therefore, the groups we compared were only neutral and empowered.

We found that there was no significant difference between neutral and empowered groups and their evaluations of the police officer based on gender. Overall, male police officers were rated more favorably than females, but not significantly. When we compared the GAM and the IEEI scores, we found that empowered females displayed an explicit preference for female authority figures. Neutral females showed no significant difference in explicit preference.