Abstract
Cecilia L. Ridgeway on identity, status, and social inequalities.
If we think about status at all, most of us assume it is trivial—a sort of social vanity to be avoided. Yet think of what status is: the social esteem or respect associated with individuals and groups, such as races, genders, classes. It attaches to our occupations and universities, even to the objects, like clothes and cars, connected to individuals and groups. Surely, from this vantage point, it is not trivial to care about status. Indeed, a large body of empirical evidence shows that status is a powerful motivating force for individuals that affects their well-being and even health. The problem, however, is that status is not merely esteem and respect, but a relative ranking in esteem and respect. Because one person or group is more esteemed or respected than another, status is a hierarchical inequality in something that is hard for us not to care about. That makes it a potent but unsettling force in both the everyday life of individuals and the structure of society—whether we like to think about it or not.
Unfortunately, status naturally arises in everyday life in places we rarely think of it as mattering. For instance, status emerges spontaneously when we work with others to pursue a goal we care about in the classroom, in the workplace, and among friends talking sports. People start talking and implicitly evaluating each other’s ideas in terms of how valuable they are for the group’s goals. Before long, some people become more important and influential—in other words, higher status—in the situation than others. This process is so taken for granted that we are often only aware of it after the fact. "Wait, what just happened? How did I end up at the bottom?" As this suggests, and a great deal of evidence shows, people in groups judge others and grant them status on the basis of their perceived value and competence, compared to others, with regard to the group’s goals. This means status is not necessarily fixed or static, but fluctuates as people move from one situation and group to another. This is the sense in which status is an everyday process that we "do" all the time, with or without awareness, while we are doing other activities. It shapes how we act in the classroom and how we act at work. And as we do status in all these everyday contexts, it infuses itself more broadly into the organizations and institutions around us.
Status is not merely esteem and respect, but a relative ranking in esteem and respect.
Status may emerge as a routine consequence of daily interactions, but it has very real consequences for whether our experiences are positive or negative, whether we are valued or ignored. Our relative status in important contexts like the classroom or the workplace affects the opportunities we are given and the rewards we are directed toward over our lives. One worker is noticed and given better assignments and promotion chances than another. "Ok," we might say, "that is what achievement is about." But, again, there is a problem. Research shows the competence and status attributed to people in local contexts is powerfully shaped by the status of the social identity groups they belong to, such as their class, race, or gender.
Stereotypes of identities like classes, races, and genders contain widely shared beliefs that people in one category of a given identity (say, middle- or upper-class people, Whites, and men) are more valuable and diffusely more competent, especially at the things that count, than those in another category of the identity (working-class people, non-Whites, and women). In everyday social contexts, these status beliefs subtly bias others’ and sometimes people’s own expectations and judgments of their competence and promise in the context. And research shows that these biased expectations tend to become self-fulfilling. The upper middle-class college student, buoyed by his own and others’ expectations for him, speaks up eagerly in class. The first-generation student, feeling new to the situation compared to others, hesitates. The conversation goes quickly in the direction of the first student, and people start talking about his ideas. By the end of class, it simply seems like the class privileged student is "better" and has more promise than the equally smart and talented first-generation student.
The effects of everyday status add up, not just in individuals’ lives but in the average resources and power of people in differently statused identity groups. Individuals can learn to recognize these processes and try to resist them, but it is not easy when status beliefs about their identity groups continue to be widely held. Real change that will erode these status beliefs requires individual resistance, sustained, organized social efforts, and material changes in society.