Situational effects on the measurement of women's fear of success

This study was designed to investigate two aspects of the construct, fear of success. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) responses to a measure of fear of success are affected by the situation in which the measure is administered; (2) there is a relationship between response given to the fear- of-success measure and a measure of sex-role attitude. The fear-of-success and sex-role attitude measures were administered by a male or female experimenter in three types of groups: (1) all female group; (2) group in which females were a 70% majority; (3) group in which females were a 30% minority. Analyses of variance revealed no significant effect due to sex composition of the group or sex of experimenter on the fear-of-success measurement. In addition, no relationship was found between scores on fear-of-success and sex-role attitude measures.