Gender, Status & Voice: an uneven distribution

A guided trail · 13 stops · through the research literature

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).

Walk this trail on the interactive map →

The route

  1. Status Characteristics and Social Interaction (Berger, 1972)

    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…

  2. Straight Talking: The Sociolinguistics of Heterosexuality (Cameron, 2014)

    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.

  3. Power, Approach, and Inhibition (Keltner, 2003)

    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…

  4. Men and Women of the Corporation (Kanter, 1977)

    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.

  5. Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations (Acker, 1990)

    Acker's paper made the argument that organisational structure is not gender neutral, and it changed how the field could think.

  6. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics (Crenshaw, 1989)

    This is the paper that gave the world intersectionality, and it did so by noticing that the law could not see Black women.

  7. The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Freeman, 1972)

    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.

  8. Why Status Matters for Inequality (Ridgeway, 2014)

    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…

  9. Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations (Brescoll, 2011)

    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…

  10. The Social Consequences of Voice: An Examination of Voice Type and Gender on Status and Subsequent Leader Emergence (McClean, 2018)

    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.

  11. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Psychological Safety, Black Girls' Speech, and Black Feminist Perspectives on Directness (Woodson, 2020)

    Woodson turns a Black feminist lens on the concept of psychological safety itself, and finds it wanting.

  12. Scientific Medical Conferences Can Be Easily Modified to Improve Female Inclusion: A Prospective Study (Salem, McDonagh, Avis, Eng, Smith & Murphy, 2021)

    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…

  13. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (hooks, 1994)

    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.