Cecilia L.L. Ridgeway

Biosketch

Cecilia L. Ridgeway, PhD, is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emerita, in the Department of Sociology, Stanford University. She earned her BA in Sociology from the University of Michigan and her MA and PhD in Sociology from Cornell University. She began as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1972, moved to the University of Iowa in 1985, and then, in 1991, as a full Professor, joined the Sociology Department of Stanford University. She is a fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, a member of the Sociological Research Association, and a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. She is a past President of the American Sociological Association. Awards include the Cooley-Mead Award for career contributions to social psychology and the Jessie Bernard Award for career contributions to gender scholarship from the American Sociological Association and the Feminist Lecturer Award from Sociologists for Women in Society.

Research Interests

Dr. Ridgeway’s research addresses interpersonal status hierarchies and their significance for larger processes of stratification and inequality in a society, particularly inequalities based on social differences, such as gender, race, and social class. In one set of work, Ridgeway identifies gender as a primary cultural frame people use to organize relations with others so that people “do gender” and “do status” together. This shapes the development of gender difference and inequality in interaction. She then specifies how “doing gender status” in social relations perpetuates gender inequality in the face of universalizing institutional and socioeconomic processes in the modern world. In other work, her experiments show how structurally constrained interactions construct and spread status beliefs that one social group is “better” than another and how these beliefs coordinate social relations to produce status advantage for some groups over others. Other key experiments demonstrate the implicit normative bases of status hierarchies and how these norms emerge from people’s cooperative interdependence to achieve shared goals and the competitive tensions that are inherent within such efforts. She also shows how these implicit norms manage the role of dominance in status hierarchies. Ridgeway theorizes status as a deeply learned socio-structural schema of rules that people draw on to manage the coordination problems of a fundamental human condition—working together for shared goals—creating an on-going inequality process as basic as wealth and power.