ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that people's everyday use of gender as a primary means for organizing their social relations with others is a powerful social process that continually re-creates gender inequality in new forms as society changes. At the individual level, gender stereotypes are subject to powerful confirmation biases that cause people to resist noticing gender-inconsistent information or to reinterpret it as consistent. The most telling evidence that the gender frame reestablishes gender inequality at sites of innovation would come from sites for which the argument makes different predictions about the degrees of inequality likely to emerge. The work world is important for the persistence of gender inequality, but so is the world of intimate heterosexual unions. Despite the increasingly egalitarian material terms on which college men and women encounter one another, lagging cultural beliefs about gender continue to cause substantial inequality in close heterosexual bonds.
