Food- and eating-related gender role orientations: Scale development and validation Part 1: Itemreduction

Gender roles shape a wide range of health-relevant behaviors, including food choices, dietary patterns and eating practices. Research consistently demonstrates that eating behavior is deeply gendered. Across cultures, specific foods, dietary practices, portion sizes and consumption modalities are associated with femininity and masculinity (e.g., Counihan & Kaplan, 2003; Irvine et al., 2025, Kelly & Ciclitira, 2011; Woolhouse et al., 2012). Further, food-gender associations influence person perception and can serve as a means for expressing one’s own gender identity, suggesting that food and eating constitute a domain in which gender roles can be actively performed (Cavazza et al., 2015; Vartanian et al., 2007). Despite this well-documented link between gender and eating, existing instruments for assessing gender role orientations do not capture this domain-specific manifestation. For example, the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974) and revised versions (e.g., BSRI-R; Troche & Rammsayer, 2011) assesses general personality traits (e.g., assertive, compassionate) that were identified as gender-stereotypical, but do not capture how gender roles manifest in specific behavioral domains. Other more recent instruments such as the Gender-Related Attributes Survey (GERAS; Gruber et al., 2020) broaden this approach by additionally including cognitions (e.g., solving equations, formulating texts) and interests and activities (e.g., yoga, lifting weights), yet do not address the domain of food and eating. To date, no validated scale exists that assesses the degree to which individuals endorse feminine and masculine gender role orientations specifically in the context of food and eating behavior. The present project addresses this gap by developing and validating a scale assessing food- and eating-related gender role orientations. Following established scale development procedures (Boateng et al., 2018), we adopt a multi-phase approach. The current preregistration concerns the item evaluation and reduction, in which independent raters assess each candidate item with respect to how stereotypically feminine and masculine they perceive it to be. Items that fail to reach predefined retention criteria will be removed from the pool.