On tasks that require the mental rotation of 3-dimensional figures, males typically exhibit higher accuracy than females. Using the most common measure of mental rotation (i.e., the Mental Rotations Test), we investigated whether individual variability in confidence mediates this sex difference in mental rotation performance. In each of four experiments, the sex difference was reliably elicited and eliminated by controlling or manipulating participants' confidence. Specifically, confidence predicted performance within and between sexes (Experiment 1), rendering confidence irrelevant to the task reliably eliminated the sex difference in performance (Experiments 2 and 3), and manipulating confidence significantly affected performance (Experiment 4). Thus, confidence mediates the sex difference in mental rotation performance and hence the sex difference appears to be a difference of performance rather than ability. Results are discussed in relation to other potential mediators and mechanisms, such as gender roles, sex stereotypes, spatial experience, rotation strategies, working memory, and spatial attention.

Although political and social progress for women has been on the rise for decades, present-day discussions about feminism and attitudes toward women exploded when a woman emerged as a presidential front-runner and another as a nominee for vice president in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The 1970s witnessed a surge of discussions about feminism, and accordingly, measures of attitudes toward women were in high demand (Thistle, 2006). In response, researchers developed two of the most widely used scales to assess attitudes toward women, their roles in society, the feminist movement, and feminist ideology. In 1972, the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972) was designed to measure attitudes toward women's rights, roles, privileges, and responsibilities within society. A few years later, the Attitudes Toward Feminism Scale (FEM; E. R. Smith, Ferree, & Miller, 1975) was created, focusing on perceptions of prejudice, sexism, and authoritarian attitudes toward women. Although numerous measures of feminist attitudes have been introduced in more recent history (e.g., Liberal Feminist Attitude and Ideology Scale: Morgan, 1996), the AWS was described as one of the most commonly used measures of gender-related attitudes toward women

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