Gender, Interaction, and Inequality

260 Pages·1992·5.013 MB·English

by  Cecilia L. Ridgeway (auth.)

Gender, Interaction, and Inequality
Cecilia L. Ridgeway
Gender, Interaction,
and Inequality
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Cecilia L. Ridgeway
Department of Sociology
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305, USA
With four illustrations.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data
Gender, interaetion, and equality/Cecilia L. Ridgeway, editor.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical referenees and index.
ISBN 978-1-4419-3098-9 ISBN 978-1-4757-2199-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-2199-7
1. Sex role. 2. Social interaetion. 3. Sex differenees
(Psyehology) 1. Ridgeway, Cecilia L.
HQ1075.G464 1991
305.3-de20 91-4184
Printed on aeid-free paper.
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York
OriginaJly published by Springer-VerlagNew York Inc. in 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1992
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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vu
Introduction: Gender and the Role of Interaction in
Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY
1 Gender, Power, and Social Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LINDA D. MOLM AND MARK HEDLEY
2 Gender, Formal Authority, and Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
CATHRYN JOHNSON
3 The Look of Power: Gender Differences and Similarities
in Visual Dominance Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
STEVE L. ELLYSON, JOHN F. DOVIDIO, AND CLIFFORD E. BROWN
4 Touch Asymmetry Between the Sexes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
JUDITH A. HALL AND ELLEN M. VECCIA
5 Sex Differences in Interaction Style in Task Groups . . . . . . . . . . . 97
WENDY WOOD AND NANCY RHODES
6 Gender and Conversational Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
LYNN SMITH-LOVIN AND DAWN T. RoBINSON
7 Are Gender Differences Status Differences? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY AND DAVID DIEKEMA
8 Gender and Double Standards for Competence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
MARTHA FoscHI
9 Gender, Interaction, and Inequality in Organizations . . . . . . . . . . 208
PATRICIA YANCEY MARTIN
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
v
Contributors
CLIFFORD E. BROWN Department of Psychology, Wittenberg University,
Springfield, Ohio 45501, USA.
DAVID DIEKEMA Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, Iowa
City, Iowa 52242, USA.
JoHN F. DoVIDIO Department of Psychology, Colgate University,
Hamilton, New York 13346, USA.
STEVE L. ELLYSON Department of Psychology, Youngstown State Uni
versity, Youngstown, Ohio 44555, USA.
MARTHA FoscHI Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z1.
JuDITH A. HALL Department of Psychology, Northeastern University,
Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
MARK HEDLEY Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson,
Arizona 85721, USA.
CATHRYN JOHNSON Department of Sociology, Emory University,
Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA.
PATRICIA YANCEY MARTIN Department of Sociology, Florida State
University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA.
LINDA D. MoLM Department of Sociology, University of Arizona,
Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.
NANCY RHODES Department of Psychology, Texas A & M University,
College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY Department of Sociology, Stanford University,
Stanford, California 94305, USA.
DAWN T. RoBINSON Department of Sociology, Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
vii
viii Contributors
LYNN SMITH-LOVIN Department of Sociology, University of Arizona,
Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.
ELLEN M. VECCIA Department of Psychology, Northeastern University,
Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
WENDY WooD Department of Psychology, Texas A & M University,
College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
Introduction: Gender and the
Role of Interaction in Inequality
L.
CECILIA RIDGEWAY
Through what mechanisms does gender affect interaction in face-to-face
encounters? How does the impact of gender on interaction affect struc
tures of inequality between men and women? To what extent are gendered
patterns of interaction, in turn, a product of men's and women's different
status and resources in the larger society? These are the questions this
book addresses. It does so with the intent of increasing our understanding
of the role played by interactional dynamics in explaining gender differ
ences in behavior and gender inequality in society.
Because gender is one of a very few "master roles" that are the
foundation for both personal identity and the societal division of labor, it
has effects on and is affected by virtually all types of interaction. How
ever, this book focuses primarily on one broad type of interaction: that
which is task or goal oriented. This is the sort of interaction that charac
terizes committees, teams, community groups, juries, classrooms, work
groups, and so on. Goal-oriented interaction is the interaction of "work"
(paid and unpaid). It is a major social arena in which decisions are made
in society about the distribution of material resources and through which
individuals gain access to positions of authority and power. Thus, this
book focuses on goal-oriented interaction because it is especially relevant
for understanding inequalities in men's and women's status and power in
society.
Most social scientific efforts to explain gender inequality tend to leap
between causal processes at the macrostructural level of socioeconomic
organization and causal processes on the individual level of learned
behavior and identity. The intermediate level of interaction is often
neglected. This is unfortunate not only because interaction and its organ
ization by gender is important in its own right. Interaction is also impor
tant because it is itself a key mediating mechanism, or proximal cause, by
which many macrostructural as well as individual-level aspects of gender
and inequality are accomplished. Consequently, a better understanding
of gender processes in interaction is necessary to understand how our
society's system of gender stratification operates.
ix
x Cecilia L. Ridgeway
An example might clarify this point. At the macro structural level, two
important indicators of men's greater resources, power and prestige, are
the persistent wage gap and occupational segregation between men and
women. In recent years, a great deal of research has attempoted to
pinpoint the causes of these structural indicators with complex and as yet
incomplete results (e.g., Baron & Bielby, 1984; Blau & Ferber, 1986;
Reskin, 1984; Reskin & Hartmann, 1986). This research has nevertheless
shown quite clearly that wage inequality and occupational segregation
have persisted over substantial changes in a variety of potentially contri
buting economic and social structural factors, including rising female
labor force participation. How this occurs is a very complex problem, but
interaction may provide one piece of the puzzle. I suspect that face
to-face interaction is one important medium through which gender
inequality is written into newly developing forms of socioeconomic
organization. Consequently, understanding the nature and causes of
gender's effects on interaction is crucial to determining if and how inter
action contributes to the persistent reproduction of gender stratification in
society over changing social structural conditions.
As some psychologists have recently noted (e.g., Eagly, 1987; Maccoby,
1990), a similar case could be made at the individual level about the
importance of interaction for the emergence and maintenance of gender
differences in individual behavior. For individuals, the ability to learn,
enact, and become various socially recognized identities is constrained by
the identities or roles they are allowed to play in the organization of
interaction. Many aspects of gender roles are taught, evoked and, most
importantly, enforced through the structure of opportunities the individ
ual is presented in face-to-face interaction. Because of the relevance of
interactional dynamics to individual and social structural processes, this
book can be of use to anyone interested in how a social system of
gendering operates.
This book seeks to delineate the mechanisms or processes by which
gender has its effects on interaction. It does not aim for a broad descriptive
survey of all possible gender effects in interactional settings. Instead, each
chapter scrutinizes theoretical efforts to explain and interpret major em
pirical findings about gender's effects on crucial aspects of interaction. A
variety of theoretical perspectives are represented. Some theories such as
those dealing with the status value of gender, structural positions, gender
roles, socialization, and gender subcultures are discussed in several
chapters. The contributors do not all adopt the same stance toward these
theories. Controversies as well as agreements are represented. All con
tributors, however, are similarly committed to an analytical approach.
Each emphasizes the development of causal explanations that can more
adequately account for the existing empirical evidence of gender's impact
on interaction.
Introduction xi
Causal explanations are essential for theory building. In focusing on
causal mechanisms rather than descriptive effects, the goal of this volume
is to increase our theoretical understanding of the way gender operates in
interaction. Theoretical analyses of gender's effects in interaction, in
turn, are necessary to understand how such effects might be implicated
with individual-level and social structural-level processes in the larger
system of gender inequality.
Despite other differences, the contributors to this book all take what
might be loosely called a "microstructural" approach to gender and
interaction. All agree that individuals come to interaction with certain
common, socially created beliefs, cultural meanings, experiences, and
social rules. These include stereotypes about gendered activities and
skills, beliefs about the status value of gender, rules for interacting in
certain settings, and so on. However, as individuals apply these beliefs
and rules to the specific contingent events of interaction, they combine
and reshape their implications in distinctive ways that are particular to the
encounter. As a result, individuals actively construct their social relations
in the encounter through their interaction. The patterns of relations that
develop are not completely determined or scripted in advance by the
beliefs and rules of the larger society. Consequently, there is a reciprocal
causal relationship between constructed patterns of interaction and larger
social structural forms.
The constructed patterns of social relations among a set of interactants
can be thought of as micro-level social structures or, more simply,
"microstructures." Microstructures include patterned differences that
emerge among the interactants in power and prestige, influence, the
organization of speaking, nonverbal behavior, situated identities, and
social and emotional behavior. As this list indicates, microstructures have
both a hierarchical aspect-who has more power and esteem in the
encounter?-and a division-of-labor aspect-who does what? The
chapters of this book consider how gender affects both the hierarchical
nature and the divisions of labor that characterize the microstructures
that emerge during goal-oriented interaction.
The concept of interactional microstructures overlaps with the more
familiar concepts of small groups, group dynamics, and group structure.
Indeed, some contributors to this book explicitly focus on groups in their
analyses of gender's effects on interaction. However, the concept of
microstructures is broader than that of a small group. By most definitions,
groups involve an explicit sense of collective identity in addition to
normative patterns of interaction. Microstructures, on the other hand,
exist whenever normative patterns of interaction develop among a given
set of people, whether or not the people think of themselves as a group.
A boss and a secretary, for instance, can develop regular patterns of
interaction without an explicit sense that they form a distinct group.
xii Cecilia L. Ridgeway
As this suggests, the behavioral arrangements and shared expectations
that constitute a microstructure are sometimes quite subtle. Interactants
often develop them without being explicitly aware that they are doing so.
Yet interactants create microstructures quite quickly, usually after only a
few moments of interaction. Furthermore, once created, these patterns
themselves become a force that shapes subsequent interaction. This is
what makes microstructures of interaction important. They develop as a
distinct level of social organization that exerts its own influence both on
its individual participants and on larger organizations within which it may
be embedded. Thus, microstructures mediate relationships between
individuals and larger forms of social organizations. In different ways,
each chapter reflects on the importance of gendered interactional micro
structures for understanding either gender differences in individual
behavior or gender inequality in larger organizational forms.
A great many task-oriented microstructures are created by the
interactions people engage in to fulfill their obligations to a larger or
ganization. Consequently, many, although by no means all, such micro
structures are embedded within larger formal organizations. In some
cases, the members of a particular microstructure begin as formal peers in
that they all share the same formal position in the organization that brings
them together. Juries are formal peers in this sense as are members of the
secretarial pool.
In other cases, however, interactants do not begin as peers. They are
formally unequal in their position within organizational structure (e.g.,
boss and secretary). Because of the gendered division of labor in our
society, mixed-sex interaction that is goal oriented quite often involves
men and women who hold unequal formal positions and, consequently,
unequal structural power and authority.
Naturally, such formal differences profoundly affect the patterns of
interaction that develop, but interestingly, they do not wholly determine
them. In examining gender's effects on microstructures of interaction, it is
also important to address how such effects are modified when interactants
begin with unequal formal positions. This is especially important for
understanding the role interactional dynamics play in maintaining larger
organizational aspects of gender inequality. It is just as critical for ex
plaining gender differences in behavior. To what extent are such differ
ences produced by differences in the power and authority of the formal
positions men and women occupy? Do men and women act similarly
when they are in similar positions of power and authority?
In Chapter 1, Linda Molm and Mark Hedley consider a crucial aspect
of this problem. They examine the ways that women and men use power
given to them by a formal position to achieve favorable outcomes in
interaction. Are men more willing or effective users of power in inter
action or do they just appear so because of their greater access to
structural power? Molm and Hedley review the arguments and evidence