How human ecology education can counter learned social hierarchies (First of 3 parts)

How we view the world and each other is often influenced by learned patterns ingrained in the social hierarchies we are forced to conform to from an early age at home and in school. In most societies, beliefs about appearance, gender, and color influence behavior and judgment in every aspect of our lives, with our shared humanity being secondary to visual and ascribed characteristics.

“[S]ocial hierarchy is the stratified ranking of group members along a valued dimension, with some members being superior or subordinate to others, and fewer members occupying the highest positions. … One’s relative status has profound effects on attention, memory, social interactions, health, and wellness. These effects can be particularly pernicious in children and adolescents,” states a 2015 article in the journal Social Neuroscience.

Our understanding of gender and race has been influenced by concepts mainly established by white men, which have been internalized in our belief systems, our appearance, social roles, and rank. These biased beliefs have consequences for equity, collaboration, and collective survival.

“Obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States to maintain the myth of meritocracy, [and] the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all,” points out a paper titled “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”

How Social Hierarchies Become Internalized

The ranking of people within social structures is reflected through everyday cues long before they are formalized into law or policy; appearance, dress, grooming, posture, and social performance become the visible indicators that categorize people.

The desire to alter one’s appearance, beyond health and financial considerations, to avoid anticipated bias fuels several industries, including entertainment, fashion, cosmetics, and plastic surgery. “American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day and make up 80 to 90 percent of the $115 billion industry for beauty products, affecting both their time and financial resources,” according to the Women and Public Policy Program of Harvard Kennedy School.

Stereotyping based on appearance is the low-hanging fruit of discrimination. According to a 2007 article published in the Asian American Law Journal, being physically attractive has several advantages in society, which extend beyond appearance. “In every aspect of our lives, we are reminded that appearance matters. Evidence suggests that society tends to attribute additional qualities of sociability, friendliness, and competence to those who are physically attractive. Appropriate standards of appearance are measured and dictated by societal norms, with white culture often serving as a reference. Those who do not measure up to society’s norms of aesthetics, appearance, and grooming are often perceived as lazy, incompetent, and less productive.”

Research on the attractiveness halo effect shows that people often infer positive traits, such as trustworthiness, from appearance. A 2023 study published in the journal PLOS One has also examined an “honesty premium” relating to judgments of attractive faces. According to the study, participants were provided with a personality description, which included manipulations of honesty, intelligence, and independence, along with personality ratings. Thereafter, “a face image of a target person was shown, and the participants rated its physical characteristics, including attractiveness. The results showed an ‘honesty premium’ effect, i.e., that target descriptions of high honesty increased the rated facial attractiveness compared to low honesty descriptions.”

This categorization of people fragments society into cultures, subcultures, and countercultures. Physical characteristics may be seen as signs of rank, intelligence, or value, making the process self-perpetuating by feeding into the human desire to belong. Discrimination then becomes embedded in individuals, governments, political parties, businesses, organizations, and schools.

The way a person looks and carries themselves can expose them to judgment before character or ability is even known or considered.

Dress, Grooming, and Social Signals

How we dress is the most visible and easiest cue to alter, which is why it so often becomes a social control mechanism. People are intimidated by dress codes and uniforms, whether the visual cue is a white coat worn by a doctor, combat fatigues, or a men’s suit; such attire is seen as a symbol of success. Each carries a long record of authority.

When I was attending a state college, I was asked to leave class for wearing pants; apparently, there was an unspoken sumptuary rule (a rule regulating consumption) regarding the dress code that applied only to women. Social ranking can also be reinforced through grooming norms, from pressure to alter natural hair textures to expectations that women adopt styles associated with youthfulness or submissiveness, turning appearance into another signal of social acceptance and status.

These rules aren’t limited to what a person wears; they have also dictated hair textures, leading to a cultural erasure of natural hair. “Hair and grooming policies that prohibit natural hairstyles—like afros, braids, bantu knots, and locs—have been used to justify the removal of Black children from classrooms and Black adults from their employment. With no nationwide legal protections against hair discrimination, Black people are often left to risk facing consequences at school or work for their natural hair or invest time and money to conform to Eurocentric professionalism and beauty standards,” explains the Legal Defense Fund.

How a woman is expected to dress is integral to shaping the image society expects them to conform to of being submissive and looking youthful. Pointing to how gender-based dress codes and patriarchy are intertwined, the nonprofit Breakthrough states, “Research suggests that historically dresses were designed to match social expectations of individuals according to their gender. These norms have crystallized into religious, cultural, and political ideologies across the world.”

Historically, whenever women have fought against these dress code expectations, it has led to progress and demands for gender equality in other areas of society. For instance, in the 1920s, when many women shed the corsets and restrictions of the Victorian era, women’s suffrage became a national cause, culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of gender. The fashion shift of the period also reflected broader changes in women’s mobility and public identity. Black and female leaders, mutually burdened by gender and appearance discrimination, continued to press for civil rights and equal access.

Schema theory helps explain how this happens—it shows how mental frameworks are organized by memory and prior knowledge, allowing people to link dress and surface cues to competence, trustworthiness, and status even when the link is unjustified. These perceptions can influence whom we trust, with whom we share our lives, and how we plan our futures.

Religious Support for Male Dominance

Many religions have supplied theological justifications for male authority. The men and women depicted in religious art and doctrines were defined by men in power in past centuries, perpetuating inherited biases. Exclusively male religious orders were among the early groups to gain wide access to writing and scriptural authority. The self-validating message of scriptures could then spread far and wide, along with the concept of male control seen as the gift of divine power.

Karl Marx said that religion is the “opium of the people,” mainly pointing out that, in a society divided into hierarchies, religion “functions as a mechanism that soothes suffering while simultaneously preventing the oppressed from confronting the real sources of that suffering,” according to the Sociology Institute.

There has been some shift in how we refer to God in the 21st century, with the Church of Sweden, the country’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, voting in 2017 to update its handbook to use more gender-neutral language for God. But religion is still largely dominated by the norms and values dictated by men, with women mostly missing from top religious leadership positions.

Sandra Ericson is an author and former chair of the Consumer Arts and Science Department at City College of San Francisco, where she led the department for nearly three decades. She is a contributor to the Observatory. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.