Structural Origins of Intersectional Stereotype Content

People are stereotyped according to multiple identities—or social categories—at once, giving rise to “intersectional stereotypes” about warmth and competence. Most work on the structural roots of stereotype content—especially intergroup inequalities and divisions of labor—focuses on whole social categories rather than intersectional identities, so it is an open question whether these theories account for intersectional stereotype content as well. I define 96 intersectional “strata” based on gender, sexuality, age, and race/ethnicity and examine the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and occupations of people with those identities in census data and survey experiment participants’ perceptions and stereotypes of those identities. Results support a model in which SES, roles, and perceived competitiveness of people with varying intersectional identities lead to intersectional stereotypes that rationalize existing intersectional inequalities and divisions of labor. Findings suggest that intersectional methods and theorizing can improve understanding of stereotypes without sacrificing parsimony.