Stratification is not a single ladder but a lattice of overlapping hierarchies. A person occupies a class position, commands a certain measure of social honour, and is simultaneously ranked by gender, ethnicity and race. Each dimension can operate as an independent basis of advantage and disadvantage, yet in lived experience they fuse. Understanding these dimensions — and their interaction through intersectionality — is essential to any sophisticated account of modern inequality.
Class
Class is the economic dimension of stratification. In the Marxist tradition it is defined by one's relationship to the means of production, dividing society into owners and non-owners locked in a relation of exploitation. In the Weberian tradition, following Max Weber, class rests on market situation — the life-chances that property, skills and services command in the marketplace — generating a plurality of class positions rather than a simple binary. Modern schemes, such as the neo-Weberian Goldthorpe classification, group occupations by employment relations and market rewards.
Class is, in principle, an achieved and open dimension: it permits mobility and is not legally fixed. Yet the intergenerational transmission of economic, cultural and social capital — the mechanisms Pierre Bourdieu identified — means class advantage is reproduced with striking persistence. Class shapes life-chances in health, education and longevity, making it, for many sociologists following Karl Marx, the master dimension around which others are organised.
Status
Status is the dimension of social honour or prestige. Weber separated it sharply from class: status groups are communities defined by a shared style of life, patterns of consumption, and mechanisms of social closure that restrict interaction, marriage and commensality. Where class is about market position, status is about social estimation and the symbolic ordering of superiority and inferiority.
Caste is the paradigmatic status hierarchy — a closed order in which rank is ascribed by birth and legitimised by ideas of ritual purity and pollution, as analysed by Louis Dumont. Status and class need not align: a nouveau-riche entrepreneur may have wealth without honour, while a genteel but impoverished family retains prestige. In consumer societies, status is increasingly signalled through lifestyle and taste, making it a lively dimension of contemporary distinction.
Gender
Gender is stratification by the socially constructed roles, identities and expectations attached to being male, female or non-binary. Patriarchy — a system of male dominance — allocates power, property, prestige and opportunity unequally across the sexes. Gender stratification appears in the gender pay gap, the glass ceiling limiting women's advance, the double burden of paid and domestic labour, occupational segregation, and unequal access to education and political power.
Feminist sociology insists that gender is an independent axis of stratification, not reducible to class. Radical feminists locate its root in patriarchy itself; Marxist and socialist feminists tie women's subordination to capitalism and the unpaid reproduction of labour. Sylvia Walby's account of public and private patriarchy shows how the sites of women's subordination shift from the household to the state and market rather than disappearing. Crucially, gender cuts across every class and ethnic group, making it a pervasive stratifying force.
Ethnicity
Ethnicity refers to stratification based on shared cultural identity — common ancestry, language, religion, customs and a sense of collective belonging. Unlike class, ethnic distinction is cultural rather than economic, though the two frequently coincide. Ethnic stratification arises when cultural difference is ranked, so that some groups enjoy privileged access to resources and others face discrimination, marginalisation or exclusion.
Ethnicity may be a source of solidarity and mobilisation as well as disadvantage. In plural societies, an ethnic division of labour can channel minorities into subordinate economic niches. Because ethnic boundaries are socially constructed and situational — sharpened or softened by politics — ethnicity is a fluid yet potent basis of stratification, visible in the position of tribal communities, migrants and religious minorities.
Race
Race is stratification organised around socially assigned meanings attached to physical characteristics such as skin colour. Sociologically, race is not a biological reality but a social construction: racial categories are invented and enforced, then used to justify hierarchy. Racism — the ideology of racial superiority — has underpinned slavery, colonialism, apartheid and enduring structural discrimination.
Sociologists distinguish individual racism from institutional racism, where routine practices of organisations systematically disadvantage racial groups even without overt prejudice. Racial stratification restricts life-chances in employment, housing, justice and health, and is reproduced through segregation and stereotype. Because race is ascribed and visible, it often functions as a rigid, quasi-closed dimension of inequality.
Intersectionality
These dimensions do not operate in isolation. Intersectionality, a concept associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw and rooted in Black feminist thought, holds that class, gender, race and ethnicity intersect to produce distinct, compounded experiences of advantage and oppression. A working-class Black woman does not experience class, gender and race as separate burdens to be added up; they interlock to create a specific location that cannot be understood by any single axis alone.
Intersectionality corrects the tendency to treat each dimension in isolation and warns against a single-axis analysis that renders the multiply-disadvantaged invisible. It reveals both compounded disadvantage and unexpected privilege — a person may be advantaged on one axis and subordinated on another. For the Indian context, the intersection of caste, class and gender captures the specific vulnerability of, for instance, Dalit women, and demonstrates the analytical power of the approach.
How to use this in the exam
- Treat each dimension as an independent basis of stratification, but always show how it interacts with the others — examiners reward the move from single-axis to multidimensional analysis.
- Anchor class and status in Weber's distinction and status hierarchy in caste; this links directly to the theory note and shows conceptual continuity.
- On gender, deploy patriarchy, the glass ceiling and Walby; on race, insist that it is socially constructed and distinguish individual from institutional racism.
- Reserve intersectionality for the analytical climax: use Crenshaw and the Dalit-woman illustration to demonstrate that stratification is lived at the crossroads of multiple hierarchies.
- Use Indian examples — caste, tribe, religious minority, gender — to convert an abstract Western-theory answer into one grounded in the syllabus's applied concerns.