Status Is the Focus of the Upcoming Cook-Gray Lecture

Cecilia L. Ridgeway, M.S. ’69, Ph.D. ’72, Stanford University’s Lucie Stern Professor of Social Sciences, Emerita, will deliver the annual Alice Cook–Lois Gray Distinguished Lecture on Oct. 23.

“Status: What Is It? Why Does It Matter for Race and Gender Inequality?” will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Ives Hall, Room 115. The public is invited, and refreshments will follow the lecture. The lecture is geared to an in-person audience, but a Zoom link will be sent in the confirmation email to those who register.

Professor Ridgeway studies how interpersonal status hierarchies relate to inequalities based on gender, race and social class. The lecture will explore what Ridgeway describes as the “common mistake” of underestimating status in the perpetuation of patterns of inequality. 

“People are startlingly oblivious to status,” says Ridgeway. “This superficially laudable perspective can blind us to what’s happening.” 

What’s happening, explains Ridgeway, is that status is a major force for inequality, just like money and power. “People have to take it seriously: look for it and be alert for it.” 

Ridgeway’s lecture will provide information about status that everyone can use to chart the course of their own life more effectively. It will also offer researchers ideas about another dynamic to analyze as a major inequality process. 

Status – which Ridgeway describes as the “comparative social ranking of people, groups or objects in terms of the social esteem, respect and honor accorded to them” – can be understood as a cultural invention that helps us organize and manage social relationships as we navigate the tension between cooperative interdependence and competitive independence. Cooperative interdependence is necessary when more than one person’s effort is needed to achieve a goal, but competitive independence relates to an individual maximizing their own outcome from a group effort. 

Historically specific judgments about status can become attached to social differences – such as gender, race and class – and thus perpetuate inequality.

Ridgeway obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan before earning her master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University.

She has authored two books in this subject area: “Status: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter?” (2019) and “Framed by Gender” (2011).

The annual ILR lecture is named after deceased ILR faculty members Alice Hanson Cook and Lois Spier Gray and is held to advance their visions of social justice and equality. This year’s lecture was organized by Pamela Tolbert, the Lois S. Gray Professor of ILR and Social Sciences in the Department of Organizational Behavior.

This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell Population Center, and the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.