The Field Guide › Trails › Gender, Status & Voice: an uneven distribution
Psychological safety is not evenly distributed. This trail follows the mechanism, the structures that build it (tokenism, gendered organisations, intersectionality), and the evidence, including the evidence against the field's own assumptions. Berger (1972) to hooks (1994).
The foundational paper for Status Characteristics Theory — the sociological account of how diffuse status characteristics (race, gender, age, education) shape patterns of participation, influence, an…
Cameron's essay is the clearest statement in this map of the distinction between marked and unmarked identities, and of why that distinction matters for who can speak freely.
Proposes an integrative theory of how power shapes affect, cognition and behaviour, defining power as an individual's relative capacity to modify others' states by providing or withholding resources…
Kanter's study of a large American corporation she called Indsco produced the theory of tokenism, and with it one of the most useful ideas in the whole literature on who can speak at work.
Acker's paper made the argument that organisational structure is not gender neutral, and it changed how the field could think.
This is the paper that gave the world intersectionality, and it did so by noticing that the law could not see Black women.
Freeman's essay, written from inside the early women's liberation movement, dismantles the idea that a group can be structureless and shows why the aspiration is not just naive but dangerous.
Presidential address to the American Sociological Association arguing that status — esteem and respect-based inequality — is a central mechanism behind durable patterns of social inequality, operatin…
Three studies using archival data (US Senate floor time by gender and seniority) and experiments showing that while power has a strong positive effect on how much men talk in organizations, it has no…
A three-wave field study and experiment showing that promotive voice (speaking up with ideas for improvement) increases status and leader emergence for men — but not for women.
Woodson turns a Black feminist lens on the concept of psychological safety itself, and finds it wanting.
Salem and colleagues did something refreshingly practical: they showed that the gender gap in who gets heard at a scientific conference can be narrowed by cheap, simple changes to how sessions are ru…
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks sets out a vision of teaching as the practice of freedom, a phrase she takes directly from Freire and turns towards the classroom.