Gender, Resources, and Status: An Empirically Grounded Model of Status Construction Theory

Andre Grow , University of Leuven (KU Leuven)

Members of different social groups (e.g., men/women, whites/non-whites) are often accorded different levels of status in society and this can affect important life outcomes. Status construction theory holds that such status differences can emerge from systematic differences in the possession of valuable resources between the members of different groups. This involves a complex dynamic social process by which a set of cognitive and behavioral principles at the micro level generates wide-spread status differences at the macro level. So far, much of the existing SCT research has focused on validating the theory’s micro-level assumptions, but comparative little efforts have been made to validate its macro-level implications. In this paper, I address this lacuna. I present an empirically grounded simulation model of SCT that I use to assess how well the theory is able to explain recent changes in the gender-status system, as observe in the US context between 1970 and 2016.

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 Presented in Session 3. Population, Development, & the Environment; Data & Methods; Applied Demography