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 1 st edition 1992

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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 Uni­versity, 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

CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY

Through what mechanisms does gender affect interaction in face-to-face encounters? How does the impact of gender on interaction affect struc­tures 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 differ­ences 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. How­ever, this book focuses primarily on one broad type of interaction: that which is task or goal oriented. This is the sort of interaction that charac­terizes 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 organ­ization by gender is important in its own right. Interaction is also impor­tant 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 contri­buting 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 face­to-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 inter­action 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 individ­ual 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 em­pirical 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 con­tributors, 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 micro­structures 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 or­ganization. Consequently, many, although by no means all, such micro­structures 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 ex­plaining gender differences in behavior. To what extent are such differ­ences 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 inter­action or do they just appear so because of their greater access to structural power? Molm and Hedley review the arguments and evidence

Introduction xm

for structural theories of gender and power use that argue for the latter as well as individual-level theories that locate differences in power use in gendered traits or abilities. They then present their own exchange theory analysis of gender and power use and consider evidence from a series of laboratory experiments to evaluate it. These experiments disentangle gender and structural power by placing women and men in comparably high or low power positions and observing the strategies and effectiveness with which they use power in interaction.

Chapter 2 continues the concern with interaction between formal unequals but, instead of power, Cathryn Johnson focuses on the broader range of leader-follower behavior. She notes that most research in the area asks if women and men in formal leadership positions (i.e., managers) act similarly toward their subordinates. The findings are con­tradictory, she argues, both because research has been insufficiently linked with theory and because it focuses on leader behavior alone rather than on the interaction between leaders and subordinates. She considers what three available theories would predict about gender's impact on leader-follower interaction. Then she discusses a study that tests these predictions. The results suggest additional dimensions to the ways that gender affects leader-subordinate interaction as well as the way these change over time.

In Chapter 3, Steve Ellyson, John Dovidio, and Clifford Brown return to the question of gender and power, but focus on visual interaction and the role of nonverbal behavior in both establishing and in expressing power differences between men and women. They consider how visual dominance operates both when men and women hold formally unequal structural positions and when they do not. First they examine how the visual dominance ratios of men and women reflect and establish social power in same-sex interactions. Then they move to mixed-sex interaction and examine the effects of the status value of gender, structural inequality, and power striving on the patterns of visual dominance behavior that develop between men and women. Their concern throughout is to evaluate the causal processes that may underlie gender differences in visual inter­actions. Finally, they consider the relationship of gender differences in visual dominance to those in verbal interaction, as well a~ the implications of these differences for women's and men's long- and short-term power outcomes.

In Chapter 4, Judith Hall and Ellen Veccia also scrutinize the relation­ship between men's and women's nonverbal interaction and status and power. However, they focus on touch asymmetry between the sexes. Their particular concern is to evaluate Nancy Henley's (1977) and others' theories that explain touch asymmetry as an expression of men's status advantage over women. Hall and Veccia critically review these theories in light of current evidence on gender and touch and then discuss evidence of their own from two observational studies of touching in mixed-sex

xiv Cecilia L. Ridgeway

dyads, the first in public places like shopping malls and the second at a professional convention. They find that although men do touch women with the hand more than vice versa, the general relationship between touching and sex depends in complex ways on other status differences between the men and women.

Chapters 5 through 7 consider gender's effects on interaction when men and women begin with no formal inequalities in their positions. The gender inequalities that develop in these microstructures are entirely constructed through interaction. In the first of these chapters, Wendy Wood and Nancy Rhodes examine interaction in task groups with an input-process-output analysis that views interaction as the principal mediator between individual attributes such as gender and outputs such as task productivity and patterns of influence. The evidence indicates that in such groups a greater percentage of men's behavior is directed at the task than women's, whereas women have a higher percentage of positive social behavior than men. To explain these differences in interactional style, Wood and Rhodes critically compare socialization theories, theories of gender's status value, and Alice Eagly's (1987) role theory. Then they turn to consequences of men's and women's interaction style and show how these produce sex differences in task performance, leadership emergence, and members' satisfaction with the interaction.

In Chapter 6, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Dawn Robinson also address gender differences in interactional style, but focus more specifically on men's and women's ways of talking and its effects on the conversational dynamics that develop. They review major theoretical orientations to gender and conversational style and the empirical studies each has gen­erated in an attempt to establish the aspects of talk on which men and women systematically differ and the situations in which these differences occur. Concluding that no single theoretical orientation is adequate to the empirical evidence, they offer an integrative alternative based on affect control theory (Smith-Lovin & Heise, 1988). The theory makes formal predictions about the way learned gender identity differences in status, power, and expressivity interact with situations and events to produce gendered conversational styles. They apply their predictions to data on women's and men's interruptions in six-person groups.

In my chapter with David Diekema (Chapter 7), we critically assess theoretical efforts to explain gender differences in interaction in terms of the greater status value attached to being male in society rather than female. For those who are interested in gender inequality, not just gender differences, the status approach is appealing. However, it has been challenged recently by empirical evidence that gender differep.ces in interaction are sometimes greater between same-sex groups than within mixed-sex groups. We assess the expectation states theory of gender's status effects against three possible alternatives: socialized traits, gen­dered subcultural norms for interactional behavior, and Eagly's (1987)

Introduction xv

role approach. We make a case for the continuing predictive accuracy and theoretical usefulness of the status approach, but suggest that it be joined with some concepts from other approaches to yield a fully adequate account of the empirical evidence.

Martha Foschi's chapter on double standards (Chapter 8) also takes a status approach to gender and uses expectation states theory. However, Foschi's particular concern is to explain how gender biases the process by which some interactants come to be perceived as more competent than others in task-oriented settings. She reviews evidence that the status value of gender biases evaluations of a person's performances so that men's task contributions are perceived to be better than women's. She expands this account by proposing that status characteristics like gender also activate double standards for the way good or bad performances are used to infer competence. As a result, even when evaluations show that a man and woman have performed equally well, the man's good performance will be taken as a stronger indicator of his ability than will the woman's. Foschi discusses the relationship of this double-standard analysis to attribution arguments and presents some recent data testing her theor­etical account.

Chapter 9 returns the book to the formal structural or organizational context with which it began. However, instead of putting primary em­phasis on the impact of formal organizational structures on interaction, Patricia Yancey Martin considers how gendered interaction affects or­ganizations. She argues that people in developed nations live much of their lives in and through formal organizations and these organizations are highly gendered. Her concern is to show how organizations actively create and sustain gender inequality. They do so through a combination of macrostructural processes such as a gendered labor market and the interactional processes through which the activities of the formal organ­ization actually are carried out and its organizational structure is enacted. The gendered microstructures that emerge from and govern these inter­actions have critical implications for the maintenance of gender hierarchy within the organization.

The complex empirical determinations and theoretical conclusions of these chapters cannot be simply summarized. However, I would like to conclude this introduction by noting some clear trends or themes that run through all the chapters. First, gender affects patterns of interaction in task-oriented situations in ways that produce inequalities between men and women that perpetuate women's structural disadvantages in larger organizations and society as a whole. Second, these microstructural effects of gender are context specific and depend on the specific power and status attributes of the men and women who interact, whether the interactants are of same or mixed sex, and other such factors. There is little evidence for gender differences in interactional behavior that hold constant across broad differences of context. Third, social structural factors such as the

xvi Cecilia L. Ridgeway

power attached to the positions held by men and women and the lower status value of being female in society account for a great majority of gender differences in interactional behavior. These effects tend to reproduce through interaction men's power and status advantages in society. Finally, however, despite their enormous explanatory import­ance, structural power and status factors alone do not account for all gender effects in interaction. Multiple analytical approaches are necessary to fully explain gender's impact on interaction.

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Christina Randall for her hard work on the important task of assembling the index and Martha Foschi for encouraging me to undertake this book.

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