Abstract

There is good evidence that gender acts as primary cultural framework that people rely on to initiate the process of making sense of one another in order to organize social relations. People's everyday use of gender as a cultural device for creating micro order has widespread consequences for the persistence of gender as social system of difference and inequality. This process continually exposes cultural beliefs about gender to another micro-ordering process, the development of status hierarchies, so that gender becomes a status difference. Acting in goal-oriented encounters in the workplace and home, gender status beliefs create biases in women's expected competence and authority compared to men that, in turn, contribute to the sex-segregation of jobs, the gender gap in wages and authority, and the unequal household division of labor. Acting in sites of innovation, these same processes also rewrite gender inequality into new social and economic arrangements as society changes, in effect reinventing gender inequality for the new era.

Gender, as a social system of difference among individuals based on sex categories of male and female, is a universal feature of human societies (Wood and Eagly 2002). Gender is typically also a basis for social hierarchy and inequality between men and women. At least in Western society, gender, as a system of inequality, also has had a perplexing feature. It has shown a remarkable ability to persist over major transformations in the material-economic and social arrangements on which the inequality between men and women is based in any given era. A social hierarchy based on gender in Western society survived the profound transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized society. In the more recent era, as women have flooded into the paid labor force and into many formally male jobs, gender inequality has nevertheless managed to persist in modified form (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004; England 2010).

I argue that these distinctive aspects of the broad social system of gender – that it is a powerful system of social difference among persons and a basis of social inequality that shows troubling powers of persistence – arise from the way people use gender as a primary cultural framework for organizing their social relations with others (Ridgeway 2011).