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How can we explain the persistence of gender hierarchy over transformations in its socioeconomic base? Part of the answer lies in the mediation of gender inequality by taken-for-granted interactional processes that rewrite inequality into new institutional arrangements. The problems of interacting cause actors to automatically sex-categorize others and, thus, to cue gender stereotypes that have various effects on interactional outcomes, usually by modifying the performance of other, more salient identities. Because changes in the status dimension of gender stereotypes lag behind changes in resource inequalities, interactional status processes can reestablish gender inequalities in new structural forms. Interactional sex categorization also biases the choice of comparison others, causing men and women to judge differently the rewards available to them. Operating in workplace relations, these processes conserve inequality by driving the gender-labeling of jobs, constructing people as gender-interested actors, contributing to employers' discriminatory preferences, and mediating men's and women's perceptions of alternatives and their willingness to settle for given job outcomes.
How can we explain the persistence of gender hierarchy in our society over major historical transformations in its socioeconomic base? A system that advantages men over women in material resources, power, status, and authority (i.e., gender hierarchy) has continued in one form or another despite profound structural changes such as industrialization and the movement of production out of the household, women's accelerated movement into the labor force after World War II, and, most recently, women's entry into male-dominated occupations (Hartmann 1976; Reskin and Roos 1990). What accounts for the chameleon-like ability of gender hierarchy to reassert itself in new forms when its old structural forms erode? Although there is no single answer, part of the solution may lie in the way gender stratification is mediated by interactional processes that are largely taken for granted. In this paper I argue that interactional gender mechanisms can operate as an "invisible hand" that rewrites gender inequality into new socioeconomic arrangements as they replace the prior socioeconomic bases for gender hierarchy.
I focus on interactional mechanisms that mediate gender inequality in paid employment. Employment is one of two interdependent structural foundations on which our present system of gender hierarchy appears to rest; the other is the household division of labor. Some efforts have been made to understand the interactional...