title: Social role hierarchy and durable inequality production
title: a status approach
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Lyu, Yujia
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2024
Subjects: Inequality
Roles
Socialization
Status Hierarchy
Stereotypes
Social Structure

description: Researchers have long been searching for mechanisms underlying durable inequality between social categories. Besides top-down institutional designs that create differences, many consider the macro unequal structures are maintained daily through micro-level interactions. Researchers argue that our everyday encounters with others normalize inequality, making it harder to remove. One well-examined location is role hierarchy (e.g., manager versus employee). Past research shows that the disproportionate distribution of social roles across social groups is responsible for creating stereotypes that justify unequal life outcomes (Koenig and Eagly 2014, 2019). However, the specific social psychological pathways through which role hierarchies create stereotypes were never articulated. It was also unclear how widely shared stereotypes, like those around gender, race, or social class, come into being. How did stereotypical beliefs gain strength and spread to other places? Furthermore, in addition to stereotypes, exposure to role hierarchies also entails other byproducts that sustain inequality, which are yet to be explored.
description: To answer these questions, I draw insights from theories of status construction (Ridgeway 1991; Berger and Fişek 2006) to delineate and test the role-based status belief production process. The first study uses two experiments, one online and one laboratory, to examine whether exposure to a common role hierarchy allows a nominal distinction (e.g., Group A and B) to gain status values so the different states were perceived by most Americans in the society as different in status and competence. Both experiments demonstrated a partially successful status construction process where only differentiated perceptions of status were produced but not competent. The detection of an asymmetrical stereotype formation brings additional implications for inequality maintenance.
description: The second study assesses the strengths of role-based status beliefs. Their ability to bias group structures in other contexts makes stereotypes or status beliefs consequential. Based on previous theoretical extensions (Webster and Hysom 1998), the behavioral enactment of the role hierarchy and the violation of role expectations are likely to produce strong status beliefs that make them more likely to diffuse to other locations. With a laboratory experiment, I empirically examine these predictions. Female participants recruited from a large Midwestern university reacted more strongly to the behaviorally presented and the violated role hierarchy than a symbolic one. Moreover, only those who experienced norm violation considered third-order perceived competence advantage relevant to the performance outcomes of a new collaborative task, indicating the spread of status beliefs. Yet, despite perceiving the nominal groups as having a larger status disparity, participants hesitated to act on the status beliefs in the new task. The findings point out the limits of role-based status beliefs in becoming widely shared.
description: Lastly, I explore additional outcomes of common role hierarchy that preserve inequality in the context of college student employment. More specifically, I examine whether students’ exposure to workplace hierarchy makes them more or less likely to “fit” on campus, which is gaining the skills or knowledge to navigate the higher education system. By interviewing 26 students about their work experience, I found that students’ workplace hierarchies have distinct shapes. Some had greater emphasis on work completion and more rigid hierarchies, while others were centered around student growth. The different work environments cultivated different skills, which gave students uneven advantages on campus. As jobs that support students’ growth remain primarily on campus and inaccessible to students facing more significant financial pressure, student employment remains limited in narrowing education inequality in college. The findings have implications for higher education practitioners.
description: Taken together, the dissertation presents an initial attempt to articulate the mechanisms underlying role-bases inequality maintenance empirically. By bridging multiple literatures and innovative research designs, I make both theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of inequality.