Cecilia L. Ridgeway is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences. She is particularly interested in the role that social hierarchies in everyday interaction play in the larger processes of stratification and inequality in a society. Her current projects include empirical tests of status construction theory, which is a theory about the power of interactional contexts to create and spread status beliefs about social differences. This talk is part of the FS 147 class on Gender and Leadership; guest lectures for this class are free and open to all Stanford students.