Cecilia L. Ridgeway

Stanford University | SU · Department of Sociology

The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people raises important sociological questions about how the structure of sex and gender is shifting and underscores necessary changes to research practice. We review what is known about emerging gender identities and their implications for sociological understandings of the relationship between s...

Professional workplaces that embody an “ideal worker” image that is implicitly white and male set-up persistent biases against the competence and suitability for authority of those who are not white men, forcing them to work harder to prove their competence and fit in. The added labor of coping with these burdens is largely invisible to dominant ac...

Women face a double bind in positions of leadership; they are expected to display authority in order to appear competent but are judged as socially deficient if they are perceived to be too dominant. This dominance penalty is well documented, but most studies examine reactions only to white women’s leadership displays. The authors use an experiment...

In this chapter, we give a micro-level, social psychological account of how the gender beliefs evoked by sex categorization reinforce and recreate gender inequality. We argue that social interactions are framed by gender because people instantaneously and unconsciously sex categorize each other, evoking cultural beliefs about men and women. While t...

High-status members are incentivized to contribute to a group’s collective endeavors by the deference and influence they receive. But what incentives do groups offer low-status members for their continued participation and deference to high-status others? We develop and test a theoretical account of how the implicit cultural rules for status hierar...

A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a “status advantage”: they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory...

Status construction theory describes how structural conditions in society frame and constrain social encounters among people from socially different groups (e.g., racial, ethnic, or gender groups), so that these encounters foster the development of shared status beliefs about the social difference. Status beliefs are cultural beliefs that people in...

Order and stability are tenuous and fragile. People have to work to create and sustain a semblance of stability and order in their lives and in their organizations and larger communities. Order on the Edge of Chaos compares different ideas about how we coordinate and cooperate. The ideas come from 'micro-sociology', and they offer new answers to th...

Status construction theory is a theory of how widely shared status beliefs develop in a society or other collectivity about apparently nominal social differences among people such as sex or ethnicity (Ridgeway, 1991; Webster and Hysom, 1998; Ridgeway and Erickson, 2000). Status beliefs associate greater respect and greater competence at socially va...

Questions about the causes and consequences of inequality are fundamental to the discipline of sociology. Most sociological analyses contribute in some way to our understanding of what inequality is, how it is produced and reproduced, and how it affects individuals, groups, and societies. Sociologists study inequality in many and diverse contexts—b...

In an advanced industrial society like the United States, where an array of processes work against gender inequality, how does this inequality persist? Integrating research from sociology, social cognition and psychology, and organizational behavior, Framed by Gender identifies the general processes through which gender as a principle of inequality...

Status construction theory argues that interaction between people with unequal structural advantages is crucial in the development and spread of status value beliefs about people's distinguishing attributes. A central claim is that goal-oriented encounters between those who differ in material resources as well as in an easily observed nominal attri...

Workers who request flexibility are routinely stigmatized. The authors experimentally tested and confirmed the hypothesis that individuals believe others view flexworkers less positively than they do. This suggests flexibility bias stems, in part, from pluralistic ignorance. The authors also found that flexplace requesters were stigmatized signific...

Stigma and status are the major concepts in two important sociological traditions that describe related processes but that have developed in isolation. Although both approaches have great promise for understanding and improving population health, this promise has not been realized. In this paper, we consider the applicability of status characterist...

We develop an evidence-based theoretical account of how widely shared cultural beliefs about gender, race, and class intersect in interpersonal and other social relational contexts in the United States to create characteristic cultural "binds" and freedoms for actors in those contexts. We treat gender, race, and class as systems of inequality that...

To understand the mechanisms behind social inequality, this address argues that we need to more thoroughly incorporate the effects of status-inequality based on differences in esteem and respect-alongside those based on resources and power. As a micro motive for behavior, status is as significant as money and power. At a macro level, status stabili...

Most work on collective action assumes that group members are undifferentiated by status, or standing, in the group. Yet such undifferentiated groups are rare, if they exist at all. Here we extend an existing sociological research program to address how extant status hierarchies help organize collective actions by coordinating how much and when gro...

How do interpersonal status hierarchies draw their low status members into the group and maintain their involvement despite casting them as relatively less valued, influential, and esteemed than others in the group? If status hierarchies are a reward system that helps people solve the collective action problem they face when they are interdependent...

How does gender inequality persist in an advanced industrial society like the United States, where legal, political, institutional, and economic processes work against it? This book draws on empirical evidence from sociology, psychology, and organizational studies to argue that people's everyday use of gender as a primary cultural tool for organizi...

How can researchers undertake a vigorous cross-disciplinary research agenda on gender? This question might seem unnecessary given that that the study of gender, which addresses the many origins and consequences of being male or female, already is highly interdisciplinary. In principle, most social psychologists agree that both individual and societ...

Why do beliefs that attach different amounts of status to different categories of people become consensually held by the members of a society? We show that two microlevel mechanisms, in combination, imply a system-level tendency toward consensual status beliefs about a nominal characteristic. (1) Status belief diffusion: a person who has no status...

In this article, I argue that gender is a primary cultural frame for coordinating behavior and organizing social relations. I describe the implications for understanding how gender shapes social behavior and organizational structures. By my analysis, gender typically acts as a background identity that biases, in gendered directions, the performance...

Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women...

Introduction Integrating the insights gleaned from scientific research into the framework of the law requires courts to appreciate the empirical complexities of the former and the analytical details of the latter. This is no simple feat. It requires juxtaposing the lessons and limitations of science with the demands of the law. This feat has proved...

Early Research on Interactional Status StructuresTheoretical ApproachesStatus Characteristics and Expectations States TheoryStatus BeliefsConclusion

To gain an in-depth understanding of legitimacy as a general social process, we review contemporary approaches to legitimacy within two areas of sociology: social psychology and organizations. A comparison of these distinct approaches allows us to explain the process, both in implicit and explicit ways at different levels of analysis, through which...

Gender is at core a group process because people use it as a primary frame for coordinating behavior in interpersonal relations. The everyday use of sex/gender as cultural tool for organizing social relations spreads gendered meanings beyond sex and reproduction to all spheres of social life that are carried out through social relationships and con...

Status construction theory focuses on the collective development of widely shared status beliefs about apparently nominal social differences among people such as sex or ethnicity (Ridgeway 1991; Webster & Hysom 1998; Ridgeway & Erickson 2000). Status beliefs associate greater respect and greater competence at socially valued tasks with people in on...

We develop a new status construction theory argument that apparently valid social realities in which a salient social difference is consistently linked to signs of status and competence induce participants to form status beliefs. Supporting this social validity account, an experiment showed that when an influence hierarchy developed between categor...

To explain how interpersonal behavior in relational contexts usually reproduces but sometimes modifies macro structural patterns, I outline a conceptual framework within which to understand existing theories and evidence and to develop new ones. Actors create and enact structure by means of several types of shared cultural schemas (“ordering schema...

Expectation states theory is, in many ways, a textbook example of a theoretical research program. It is deductive, programmatic, formalized mathematically, cumulative, precise, and predictive; and its propositions have been subjected to rigorous evaluation. More importantly, however, it is a theory that illuminates core issues in social psychology...

One of the enduring observations of human life is that when people come together to accomplish a shared goal, be it choosing a sofa for the living room or drafting a policy for national defense, a social hierarchy soon emerges among the participants in which some have more social esteem and influence in the situation than do others (Bales 1950; Lon...

Gender is a system of social practices within society that constitutes people as different in socially significant ways and organizes relations of inequality on the basis of the differ­ ence. Like other systems of difference and inequality, such as race or class, gender in­ volves widely shared cultural beliefs and institutions at the macro-level o...

Although it has hardly disappeared, gender inequality in the labor market has declined noticeably in recent decades, by most standard indicators. Inequality is declining in labor-force participation rates, wages, and occupational sex segregation, even though considerable sex segregation remains, especially at the job and firm level (Jacobs 1999; Pe...

Hollander's (1958) theory on conformity, status, and idiosyncrasy credits was tested using female rather than male groups. Each group contained either one male or one female confederate who broke procedual norms early, in the middle, late, or never during the 15 trials of an experimental game task. For some groups the task was described as a quasi-...

Music may be understood as a structural representation, or symbolic “model,” of social interaction processes. Since music is a readily available expressive system in our society, individuals may use it as a socially meaningful symbolic medium within which they manage conflicting affective associations with interaction. Music listening then becomes...

We present evidence that many of the disadvantaging effects that motherhood has on women's workplace outcomes derive from the devalued social status attached to the task of being a primary caregiver. Using expectation states theory, we argue that when motherhood becomes a salient descriptor of a worker it, like other devalued social distinctions in...

According to the perspective developed in this article, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call “social relational” contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system. When gender is salient in these ubiquitous contexts, cultural beliefs about gender function as...

▪ Abstract The gender system includes processes that both define males and females as different in socially significant ways and justify inequality on the basis of that difference. Gender is different from other forms of social inequality in that men and women interact extensively within families and households and in other role relations. This hig...

Beliefs about diverse status characteristics have a common core content of performance capacities and qualities made up of two features: hierarchy (superior/inferior capacities) and role-differentiation (instrumental/expressive qualities). Whatever the status characteristic, its more-valued state tends to be defined as superior and instrumental, an...

As Weber (1922/1968) observed, status is a fundamental dimension of social inequality in complex societies, along with wealth and power. Status inequality is based on evaluative rankings in terms of social honor, esteem, and prestige. Compared to wealth and power, the organization and consequences of inequality based on status is relatively underth...

More than a trait of individuals, gender is an institutionalized system of social practices. The gender system is deeply entwined with social hierarchy and leadership because gender stereotypes contain status beliefs that associate greater status worthiness and competence with men than women. This review uses expectation states theory to describe h...

Status beliefs are shared beliefs that people who belong to a certain category of distinction (e.g., men, professionals) are more socially worthy and competent than those who belong to another category (women, service workers); these status beliefs often serve as a pervasive and fundamental form of legitimizing ideology in society. This chapter des...

In this article, two experiments support status construction theory's claim that interaction spreads status beliefs through behavior, creating a diffusion process that makes widely shared beliefs possible. The first demonstrates that people who hold a status belief can "teach" it by treating the other in accord with the belief. The second shows tha...

Widely shared status beliefs that characterize people in one social category as more esteemed and competent than people in another category play an important role in the organization of inequality. Status construction theory argues that the terms on which people interact across a social difference boundary can cause shared status beliefs to form an...

Social difference codes are widely shared cultural beliefs that define the socially significant distinctions on the basis of which a society is structured and inequality is organized (e.g., race, gender, occupation). They provide cultural schemas for enacting social relations on the basis of a given difference by indicating the attributes by which...

Building on the work of Ridgeway and Berger (1986), we construct a set of assumptions that describe how the legitimation and delegitimation of informal power and prestige orders can be created in task oriented situations. Our conception is a multilevel one. Cultural beliefs begin the process by shaping the likelihood that one actor treats another w...

How can we explain the persistence of gender hierarchy over transformations in its socioeconomic base? Part of the answer lies in the mediation of gender inequality by taken-for-granted interactional processes that rewrite inequality into new institutional arrangements. The problems of interacting cause actors to automatically sex-categorize others...

How are consensual beliefs about the status-value of individual characteristics created in a society? A recent theory posits that inequalities in the distribution of resources in a population are translated into greater or lesser levels of consensus via social interaction in small groups. According to this theory, a macrostructural correlation betw...

Peer groups pose special problems of understanding the legitimation of informal hierarchies. How and to what extent are cultural accounts evoked to support these hierarchies and make them normative for group members? We test a theory of this process that makes two predictions: 1) peer group members are less likely to treat their hierarchy as legiti...

A process by which informal status hierarchies become legitimated is used to explain why those who operate from a disadvantaged external-status position, such as women or minorities, often have difficulty wielding directive power over other group members, even if they achieve high rank within the group. The theory predicts that a status structure i...

Part 1 Introduction and overview. Part 2 Biological essentialism: the Biological Politics of the Late-l9th and Early 20th Centuries The Modern Period I - Just-So Stories of Socio-Biology The Modern Period II - Prenatal Hormone Theory An Alternative Hypothesis - The Body in Context But Are There Really No Biological Differences Beyond the Body?. Par...

A unique multilevel perspective-structural social psychology-is explicated to help build theoretical bridges between micro and macro levels of analysis in sociology. The perspective portrays actors (human or corporate) as having minimal properties of purposiveness and responsiveness, encounters as interaction episodes between multiple actors, micro...

Are gender differences in interaction a result of women’s lower status and power in society as a whole? A number of researchers have argued that they are (Berger, Rosenholtz, & Zelditch, 1980; Fishman, 1978; Hall, 1972; Henley, 1977; Lockheed, 1985; West & Zimmerman, 1977; Zimmerman & West, 1975). To anyone whose motive for studying gender differen...

This article describes micro-macro processes through which simple structural conditions cause a nominal characteristic such as gender or race to acquire independent status value. These conditions are sufficient but not necessary and may or may not be involved in the actual historical origin of a given characteristic's status value. The argument ass...

To clarify the impact of dominance behavior on status in task groups, the formation of status hierarchies must be viewed as the collective product of joint interaction among the entire network of group members rather than as an aggregate of independent dyadic encounters. A network-collective analysis indicates that the impact of a dyadic dominance...

Linking nonverbal behavior to influence in task groups has been interpreted as evidence that behavioral dominance is the basis of status. Challenging this interpretation, this paper proposes that both the power processes that underlie status formation and the structural implications of dominance hierarchies indicate that expectations about task per...

This paper proposes an expectation states theory of the legitimation of power and prestige orders in task groups. Valued status positions are a reward for those whose distribution members develop expectations. The more differentiated these expectations, the more likely that the power and prestige order will be treated as legitimate. Applying our fo...

Recent findings relating nonverbal cues to face-to-face status have not been placed within a general theoretical account so that they can be understood in relation to other factors in the status process. To address this problem, we organized recent results into two empirical generalizations about status and nonverbal task cues and offered an initia...

This paper presents evidence that members' perceived motivation towards the group is an important determinant of the influence and status they attain in task-oriented groups. Following Meeker and Weitzel-O'Neill (1977) and Ridgeway (1978), it was suggested that people who enter a group with low external status characteristics (e.g., women in mixed...

The impact of conformity and nonconformity on influence in task groups is still uncertain. This paper presents a test of the author's recent theory (Ridgeway, 1978) which reconciles the conflicting findings in the area and contrasts it with a test of the currently accepted theory (Hollander, 1958, 1960). Hollander argues that prior conformity enhan...