The gauge sector of the standard model exhibits a flavor symmetry that allows for independent unitary transformations of the fermion multiplets. In the standard model the flavor symmetry is broken by the Yukawa couplings to the Higgs boson, and the resulting fermion masses and mixing angles show a pronounced hierarchy. In this work we connect the observed hierarchy to a sequence of intermediate effective theories, where the flavor symmetries are broken in a stepwise fashion by vacuum expectation values of suitably constructed spurion fields. We identify the possible scenarios in the quark sector and discuss some implications of this approach.