About

Cecilia Ridgeway is the Lucie Stern Professor of Social Sciences, Emerita, in the Sociology Department at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the role that social hierarchies in everyday social relations play in larger processes of stratification and inequality within society. She is particularly interested in interpersonal status hierarchies, which involve hierarchies of esteem and influence, and their significance for inequalities based on gender, race, and social class. Ridgeway has contributed extensively to understanding how social status influences social judgments and group dynamics, including the development and spread of status beliefs through interactional contexts. Her scholarly work includes a broad analysis of the nature of status as a form of inequality and its role in social differences such as gender and race. She has developed and empirically tested theories about how social differences become status distinctions, and how these distinctions are maintained and transmitted through social interactions. Ridgeway has also examined the persistence of gender inequality despite societal changes, exploring how interactional processes and cultural beliefs contribute to ongoing disparities. Her contributions have been recognized through numerous awards and her service as President of the American Sociological Association, reflecting her influence in the field of social psychology and sociology.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Mathematical analysis
• Social psychology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Intersectional Gender and Race in Interaction and Inequality: An Updated Account for Group Processes

  Advances in group processes · 2025-11-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Purpose The goal of this chapter is to provide an updated account for group processes researchers of race and gender intersectional effects in social relations and their consequences for people of differing race and gender identities. Methodology/Approach The author takes Ridgeway and Kricheli-Katz’s initial theoretical framework for race and gender intersectional processes in social relations as a starting point. The author reviews and critically assesses subsequent empirical evidence and theoretical developments relevant to its arguments in order to create an updated account. Findings Current evidence strengthens support for key arguments about implicit prototypes within stereotypes that are both raced and gendered, that are defined in relation to a male and white standard, and that have socio-cognitive effects on perceptions, judgments, and behaviors toward others. Current evidence and theorizing about the effects of prototypes on judgments and outcomes in social relations suggest further distinguishing the discriminatory effects of hypo- and hyper-prototypicality, compared to prototypicality rather than just prototypicality versus nonprototypicality. Recent research also strengths evidence for the framing importance of context for intersectional effects and raises new issues. These include whether backlash against gender status violations is strongest within race, the intersectional effects of sexuality, the extensive power of gender as an intersectional dimension, and the problem of complex, intersectional stereotypes of class, race, and gender. Social and Theoretical Implications While intersectional effects vary by context, they are ubiquitous and must be taken into account to understand how race and gender shape relational inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Status construction

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-06-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Gender Categories and the Sex/Gender System

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2024-04-29 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 sex and gender and the maintenance of the sex/gender system of inequality. Transgender and nonbinary identities are increasingly common among younger cohorts and improved survey measurements of sex and gender are expanding information about these changes. In the United States, an additional gender category seems to be solidifying in public usage even as the higher status of masculinity over femininity persists. The continuing power of the normative binary contributes to both violent backlash and characteristic patterns of discrimination against gender diverse people; yet, underlying support for nondiscrimination in the workplace is stronger than commonly recognized. New, more consistent efforts to account for gender diversity in social science research are needed to fully understand these changes.

  PublisherDOI

• Everyday Status Really does Matter

  Contexts · 2024-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Cecilia L. Ridgeway on identity, status, and social inequalities.

  PublisherDOI

• Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2023-12-22 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sociology and Psychology

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology · 2022-04-19 · 23 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Sociology is the social scientific investigation of groups, organizations, and societies and the interaction of people within social contexts. Psychology is typically defined as the study of mind and behavior. Despite the disciplines’ contrasting emphases on groups and collectivities versus the individual, there is an inherent overlap between their domains. The human species is distinctively characterized by individuals who think and act with a view to their own agency but do so in the contexts of groups and relationships upon which they depend for their very survival, let alone their well-being. Because of the dual primacy of the group and the individual that characterizes human life, there are few questions in either psychology or sociology that do not involve in some degree the concerns of the other discipline. This overlap in domain comes to the fore in social psychology, which exists as a long-standing subspecialty in both disciplines. The history of relations between sociology and psychology takes place through the entangled origins of the subspecialty of social psychology in each discipline and the subsequent post–World War II joint PhD programs and departments in social psychology and social relations. Driven by growing disciplinary competition and differentiation, this institutionalized cooperation between the disciplines collapsed at the end of the 1960s. Although the two social psychologies have since developed largely in parallel, the inherent overlap of subject matter has led to more informal cross-disciplinary dialog and mutual influence over a changing set of substantive topics of mutual concern. Sociological social psychology can be divided into symbolic interactionism and the self, social structure and personality, and structural social psychology and group processes. Although different in substantive focus, each of these approaches examines linkages between various levels of social structure and individual action, with emphases on how structures and groups shape behavior in ways that reproduce societal structures but also potentially change them. Examples of recent substantive topics about which social psychologists in sociology and in psychology have engaged in substantial informal dialog are social identity theory and intergroup behavior, gender stereotypes and inequality, and status dynamics and status inequality among individuals and groups in society.

  PublisherDOI

• The Significance of Status: What It Is and How It Shapes Inequality

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022-11-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Status, a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor, pervades social life but is poorly understood and underestimated in terms of significance. We offer a new look at status as a dynamic relationship between the shared views of others and the self that organizes behavior at the micro, meso, and macro levels of society. The status process is governed by a taken-for-granted sociocultural schema consisting of implicit norms for allocating status based on the perceived value of the individual to the group, as well as on historically changing status beliefs about what types of people are more worthy and competent than others. Status plays a role as a powerful motive for individual and group action and in the construction of durable patterns of inequality based on social differences such as race and gender. The pernicious effects of status processes can be mitigated by undermining status beliefs, stereotypes, and norms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Documenting the Routine Burden of Devalued Difference in the Professional Workplace

  Gender & Society · 2022 · 47 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social psychology
  • Psychology

  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 actors in the workplace who do not experience them. To facilitate change by making such burdens visible for all, we present data from a survey of 1,349 architects, including white, Asian, Black, Latinx, and mixed race/other underrepresented men and women, about their specific behavioral experiences of prove-it-again (competence) bias, tightrope (authority) bias, problems of fit, exclusion, emotion work, and interruptions. Across all measures, white men architects report significantly lower levels of these burdens than do women of any race and almost all non-white men. Consistent with status expectations and stereotype prototypicality theories, we find intersectional patterns in the relative burdens experienced by women and men of different racial groups. Gender differences in bias experiences are greatest among white, less among Asian, and least among Black architects. Women of color report the highest levels of bias overall.

  PublisherDOI

• The Significance of Status: What It Is and How It Shapes Inequality

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Mathematics
  • Mathematical analysis

  Status, a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor, pervades social life but is poorly understood and underestimated in terms of significance. We offer a new look at status as a dynamic relationship between the shared views of others and the self that organizes behavior at the micro, meso, and macro levels of society. The status process is governed by a taken-for-granted sociocultural schema consisting of implicit norms for allocating status based on the perceived value of the individual to the group, as well as on historically changing status beliefs about what types of people are more worthy and competent than others. Status plays a role as a powerful motive for individual and group action and in the construction of durable patterns of inequality based on social differences such as race and gender. The pernicious effects of status processes can be mitigated by undermining status beliefs, stereotypes, and norms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction to Jan Stets

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2021-09-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hazel Rose Markus

  Stanford University

  8 shared

• Shelley J. Correll

  Stanford University

  7 shared

• Edward J. Lawler

  6 shared

• Cathryn Johnson

  Emory University

  6 shared

• David A. Diekema

  5 shared

• Barry Markovsky

  University of South Carolina

  4 shared

• Joseph R. Berger

  The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

  4 shared

• Lynn Smith‐Lovin

  Duke University

  3 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1974

• M.A., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1971

• B.A., Sociology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1968

Awards & honors

• Outstanding Recent Contribution Award, Social Psychology Sec…
• Outstanding Reference Source Award, American Library Associa…
• Elected to Fellow, American Association for the Advancement…
• Jesse Bernard Award for distinguished career contributions t…
• Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award, Sociologists for Wome…