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 how gender status beliefs create a network of constraining expectations and interpersonal reactions that is a major cause of the "glass ceiling." In mixed-sex or gender-relevant contexts, gender status beliefs shape men's and women's assertiveness, the attention and evaluation their performances receive, ability attributed to them on the basis of performance, the influence they achieve, and the likelihood that they emerge as leaders. Gender status beliefs also create legitimacy reactions that penalize assertive women leaders for violating the expected status order and reduce their ability to gain complaince with directives.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.

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 stabilizes resource and power inequality by transforming it into cultural status beliefs about group differences regarding who is “better” (esteemed and competent). But cultural status beliefs about which groups are “better” constitute group differences as independent dimensions of inequality that generate material advantages due to group membership itself. Acting through micro-level social relations in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere, status beliefs bias evaluations of competence and suitability for authority, bias associational preferences, and evoke resistance to status challenges from low-status group members. These effects accumulate to direct members of higher status groups toward positions of resources and power while holding back lower status group members. Through these processes, status writes group differences such as gender, race, and class-based life style into organizational structures of resources and power, creating durable inequality. Status is thus a central mechanism behind durable patterns of inequality based on social differences.

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 a social object is construed as legitimate. This comparison also suggests four stages in the process by which new social objects, both individual (worthy/unworthy individuals) and collective (organizational forms), gain legitimation: innovation, local validation, diffusion, and general validation. We then show how legitimation of the status quo—that is, the acceptance of widespread consensual schemas/beliefs in the larger society—often fosters the stability of nonoptimal actions and practices that are created as a result of these new individual and collective social objects. Finally, we discuss how consensual beliefs such as status beliefs and cultural capital fuel the reproduction of inefficiency and inequality in groups and organizations.

▪ 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 high rate of contact between men and women raises important questions about how interaction creates experiences that confirm, or potentially could undermine, the beliefs about gender difference and inequality that underlie the gender system. Any theory of gender difference and inequality must accommodate three basic findings from research on interaction. (a). People perceive gender differences to be pervasive in interaction. (b). Studies of interaction among peers with equal power and status show few gender differences in behavior. (c). Most interactions between men and women occur in the structural context of roles or status relationships that are unequal. These status and power differences create very real interaction effects, which are often confounded with gender. Beliefs about gender difference combine with structurally unequal relationships to perpetuate status beliefs, leading men and women to recreate the gender system in everyday interaction. Only peer interactions that are not driven by cultural beliefs about the general competence of men and women or interactions in which women are status- or power-advantaged over men are likely to undermine the gender system.

No abstract

No abstract

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 including gender, downwardly biases the evaluations of the worker's job competence and suitability for positions of authority. We predict that the biases evoked by the motherhood role will be more strongly discriminatory than those produced by gender alone because the perceived conflicts between the cultural definitions of the good mother and the ideal worker make motherhood seem more directly relevant to workplace performance.There is growing evidence that women suffer additional disadvantages in the workplace when they give evidence of being a mother. A recent study shows, for instance, that employed mothers in the United States suffer, on average, a 5 percent wage penalty per child even after controlling for other factors that affect wages (Budig & England, 2001). As Crittenden (2001, p. 94) observes from economic research, "The pay gap between mothers and nonmothers under age thirty-five is now larger than the wage gap between young men and women." In this article, we argue that many of the disadvantaging effects that motherhood has on women's workplace outcomes derive from the social status attached to the task of being a mother in the United States and the way this status biases evaluations of women workers' expected competence on the job. In particular, we review the evidence that motherhood is a status characteristic in the United States as that term has