Exploring the Concept of Perceived Female Sexual Empowerment: Development and Validation of the Sex is Power Scale

This paper presents three studies designed to develop and validate a scale measuring the extent to which women believe that both they and other women generally gain power through their sexuality. The first two studies used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to derive and confirm the factor structure of the Sex is Power Scale (SIPS). The SIPS is comprised of two subscales, one assessing one’s own feeling that sex can bring power and one assessing the belief that women in general use sex to gain power. In Study 3, convergent and discriminant validity were assessed. Correlations indicated that the SIPS subscales are distinct from conceptually related measures. Ways in which this scale could be useful to researchers are discussed.