Measuring Organizational Gender Backlash Against Women Leaders: Scale Development, Psychometric Evidence, and Associations With Career Self‐Limitation

ABSTRACT

This study develops and evaluates preliminary psychometric evidence for the Organizational Gender Backlash Scale (OGB‐S), a candidate measure of gendered organizational practices through which women's authority, competence, legitimacy, and access to strategic resources are challenged when they occupy or exercise leadership in masculine‐coded domains. As exploratory nomological evidence, the study examines whether OGB is associated with leadership‐related psychological and health strain and symbolic career self‐limitation among women leaders. A non‐probabilistic, purposive sample of 271 women holding formal or informal leadership positions in Peruvian organizations participated in the study. The OGB‐S was evaluated as a theoretically specified set of organizational backlash indicators covering hostility/cognitive invalidation, sabotage/obstruction, exclusion, and gender stereotyping/role policing. The revised analytical strategy follows a preliminary validity‐evidence sequence: ordinal CFA model comparisons for internal structure, reliability estimation, item‐functioning analyses conditional on the supported structure, exploratory spatial and network mapping, and nomological associations with leadership‐related strain and symbolic career self‐limitation. The complementary analyses are interpreted as exploratory or nomological evidence, not as substitutes for CFA‐based structural validation. Ordinal CFA did not support strict unidimensionality or a completed validation claim. None of the tested CFA specifications reached conventional close‐fit thresholds because RMSEA remained elevated across models. The one‐factor model for the 16 theoretically specified core items showed acceptable incremental fit but elevated absolute misfit (CFI = 0.957, TLI = 0.951, RMSEA = 0.119, SRMR = 0.061). A correlated four‐factor model improved fit (CFI = 0.976, TLI = 0.970, RMSEA = 0.093, SRMR = 0.049), and a second‐order model remained plausible but still short of close fit (CFI = 0.973, TLI = 0.967, RMSEA = 0.097, SRMR = 0.052). Reliability was high (alpha = 0.947; omega total = 0.964; Schmid–Leiman omega hierarchical = 0.842). These findings support preliminary coherence and relative multidimensional structure, not definitive construct validation or readiness for applied diagnostic use. In the two‐stage PLS‐PM exploratory nomological model, OGB was positively associated with leadership‐related strain (beta = 0.597) and with symbolic career self‐limitation through strain (indirect beta = 0.311), accounting for 35.7% of variance in strain and 55.0% in self‐limitation. The study operationalizes Organizational Gender Backlash as role‐contingent practices reported by women leaders themselves, extending backlash research beyond experimental penalties and proxy outcomes. It offers the OGB‐S as an initial measurement framework for studying how women's authority is challenged after they enter or exercise leadership roles. Consistent with the CFA evidence, the scale should be treated as a preliminary instrument requiring further item refinement, replication, and external validation.