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2001 Division 35 Presidential Address: Context Matters--Understanding Tokenism Processes and Their Impact on Women's Work

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Title: 2001 Division 35 Presidential Address: Context Matters--Understanding Tokenism Processes and Their Impact on Women's Work
Language: English
Authors: Yoder, Janice D.
Source: Psychology of Women Quarterly. Mar 2002 26(1):1-8.
Availability: Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/
Peer Reviewed: Y
Physical Description: PDF
Page Count: 8
Publication Date: 2002
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Descriptive
Descriptors: Employed Women, Tokenism, Equal Opportunities (Jobs), Nontraditional Occupations, Military Training, Social Environment, Context Effect, Sex Stereotypes, Sex Role, Status, Fire Protection
DOI: 10.1111/1471-6402.00038
ISSN: 0361-6843
Abstract: Research on tokenism processes is reviewed and coalesces around two conclusions. First, gender constructs different social contexts for token women and for token men. Second, gender is most usefully conceptualized as a status variable, not something internal to the individual. Gender serves as a status marker such that women's subordinated status intersects with other indicators of status, such as race/ethnicity, and token difference to produce negative and variable outcomes for women not experienced by similarly underrepresented men. Thus, reducing negative tokenism outcomes, most notably unfavorable social atmosphere and disrupted colleagueship, can be done effectively only by taking gender status and stereotyping into consideration. These findings have applied implications for women's full inclusion in male-dominated occupations. (Contains 1 figure.)
Abstractor: As Provided
Number of References: 60
Entry Date: 2011
Accession Number: EJ914769
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0006556331;pwq01mar.02;2002May21.12:02;v1.8</anid> <title id="AN0006556331-1">2001 DIVISION 35 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: CONTEXT MATTERS: UNDERSTANDING TOKENISM PROCESSES AND THEIR IMPACT ON WOMEN’S WORK </title> <p>Research on tokenism processes is reviewed and coalesces around two conclusions. First, gender constructs different social contexts for token women and for token men. Second, gender is most usefully conceptualized as a status variable, not something internal to the individual. Gender serves as a status marker such that women's subordinated status intersects with other indicators of status, such as race/ethnicity, and token difference to produce negative and variable outcomes for women not experienced by similarly underrepresented men. Thus, reducing negative tokenism outcomes, most notably unfavorable social atmosphere and disrupted colleagueship, can be done effectively only by taking gender status and stereotyping into consideration. These findings have applied implications for women's full inclusion in male-dominated occupations.</p> <p>One key to narrowing the universal gap between women's and men's wages is the gender integration of typically better compensated occupations dominated by men. Here I will describe a series of studies exposing the effects of tokenism as a barrier to such integration and will suggest some ways to reduce those obstacles. I will start by describing some basic facts about women's workforce participation, then go on to chronicle my evolving thinking about the cycle of tokenism.</p> <p>In 2000, women accounted for fully 48% of the workforce in the United States (Statistical Abstracts, 2001) and 46% in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2001). Throughout the world, in 1997 the average labor force participation of women in developed countries was 42–45% (United Nations, 2000). Looked at another way, nearly six of every ten women over 16 years old in both the U.S. and Canada were in the labor force—with participation rates averaging 70% for women, aged 20 to 54, globally. These participation rates in the United States varied little by race/ethnicity (Herz & Wootton, 1996). The earning ratio, which reflects the differential in median annual wages of full-time, year-round women to men workers, was .72 both in the United States in 1999 (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2001) and in Canada in 1998 (Statistics Canada, 2001), averaging two-thirds worldwide (United Nations, 2000). That means that women average about 67–72 cents for every dollar earned by men. Statisticians estimate that as much as one-third of the gap between women's and men's wages is accounted for by occupational segregation, reflecting the trend for women and men to cluster in different occupations (Cotter; DeFiore, & Hermsen, 1995).</p> <p>The United States, like 55 other developed and developing countries worldwide, saw declines in occupational segregation across the 1960s through the 1980s (Jacobs & Lim, 1992). However, gendered occupational segregation remains. In 1990, the index of segregation was 53, meaning that 53% of the female workforce would have to switch to male-dominated work in order to achieve genuine occupational integration (Reskin & Padavic, 1994). Women remain concentrated in many of the top ten occupations they dominated in the 1940s, with fully one-third of all women workers employed as secretaries, elementary school teachers, cashiers, registered nurses, bookkeepers, nurse's aides, salaried managers, sales representatives, waitresses, and sales supervisors. To make occupational segregation even more resonant, let me frame it in more individualized terms. In the United States in 1990, for every one woman lawyer, there were 101 women doing clerical work, 33 women operating factory machines, 30 sales clerks, 9 nurses aides, and 8 waitresses.</p> <p>Obviously to achieve genuine integration at entry and advanced levels within an occupation, both women and men will have to pursue occupations nontraditional for their own gender. My long-standing major line of research has focused on half of this equation: women in male-dominated occupations. My experimental and applied work explores both the costs of violating gendered norms about occupational appropriateness as well as the real-life consequences of working in a male-dominated setting. My research has included military cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York and, more recently, U.S. professional firefighters. Two key points emerge consistently from my work: First, gender constructs different social contexts for women and for men; and second, gender is most usefully conceptualized as a status variable, not something internal to the individual. Let me guide you through the chronology of my thinking and some of the empirical work I have done along the way that has lead me to these two conclusions.</p> <p>Tokenism in a Military Context</p> <p>My interest in nontraditionally employed women started in the late 1970s when, as a graduate student, I did data analyses for “Project Athena”—a large-scale study of the integration of women into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. My involvement in this project peaked in 1980 when I joined the Academy's faculty for 9 months. I spent a summer with a cadet escort and jeep assigned to me observing cadet training and experiencing some of this training firsthand and what it is like to be one of a handful of women (Yoder, 1985). Project Athena researchers were collecting a wide array of interesting personality and academic measures. Yet a question so obvious to me seemed to be overlooked in this research: “What is it like to be a woman in such a male-dominated, male-defined environment?”</p> <p>Thankfully my major adviser, Ed Hollander, recommended that I read Rosabeth Moss Kanter's then new 1977 book, “Men and Women of the Corporation.” This insightful and detailed case study probed the experiences of 20 saleswomen in a 300-person sales force at a multinational, Fortune 500 corporation. The military and corporate contexts seemed arguably parallel. Most importantly though, Kanter offered a perspective very different from the dominant discourse at the time about women's achievement. Her perspective did not blame women for failing, as did the popular “fear of success” logic (Horner, 1970), but rather focused on their immediate social context to explain their experiences. This microstructural emphasis fit nicely with my views as an applied social psychologist.</p> <p>What Kanter (1977) observed about the saleswomen she was studying is that simply because they were numerically scarce, they stood out. Such heightened visibility in turn created performance pressures. Also, because of their difference or contrast from the majority, they became socially isolated and were readily stereotyped into women-congenial roles (e.g., mother, seductress, and pet) that were fundamentally incompatible with the role demands of sales managers. Kanter proposed tokenism theory in which she defined any group comprising a subgroup of less than 15% as “skewed,” labeling scarce members “tokens” and proportionally plentiful members “dominants.” She drove home her points about the visibility of tokens and their contrast from dominants with simple, gender-neutral schematics of X's and O's. Given her emphasis on proportional scarcity, Kanter's remedy for tokenism was simple: add more O's.</p> <p>Revisiting those West Point data with this perspective in hand, we published a series of papers documenting tokenism outcomes among women cadets (Yoder, 1983, 1989; Yoder & Adams, 1984; Yoder, Adams, & Prince, 1983). Indeed, women reported feeling very visible, especially when they made mistakes, to a point where many admitted to covering up illnesses and injuries in order to avoid others' condescension. They scored higher than men on standardized tests of stress, and as many as 40% of these women recorded disruptions in their menstrual cycles, despite the fact that all were physically conditioned prior to matriculation. Women described how fraternization policies and pervasive assumptions that women seen in the company of men were “dating” served to socially isolate them from much-needed social networks. When graduating women and men were asked if they felt accepted by their peers as colleagues and as people, women rated their perceived acceptance significantly lower. Finally, women felt stereotyped into limited feminine roles that conflicted with expectations for cadets—being criticized for lacking “command voices” and being relegated to peripheral, nonleadership positions. Ultimately, attrition rates ran consistently higher for women than men across the first three graduating classes.</p> <p>Although this descriptive research fit well with Kanter's and others' reports of tokenism, these case studies were hobbled by the nonexistence of comparison conditions. A definitive test of the power of tokenism settings called for observations of these same women in token and nontoken settings. A dominant theory a the time proposed that women failed to mentor junior women because senior women were “queen bees,” self-interested women co-opted by the dominant group who sought to quell potential competition (Staines, Tavris, & Jayaratne, 1974). Our data were congruent with this reasoning: frustrated junior women at West Point reported failed attempts to seek mentoring from senior women.</p> <p>In contrast, my Project Athena colleagues and I argued that the immediate context of tokenism inhibited senior women from mentoring (Yoder, Adams, Grove, & Priest, 1985). We hypothesized that token senior women avoided other women to call less attention to their gender and that senior women simply were too stressed as tokens themselves to shoulder the added responsibility of mentoring. The litmus test of our speculation came in observations of all-women sports teams, a setting where these women were freed from their otherwise omnipresent token status. In this setting, senior women did indeed mentor junior women.</p> <p>Counting Proportions Is Not Enough</p> <p>Although I was becoming increasingly convinced about the power of a tokenism context, I questioned the gender-neutrality of Kanter's X's and O's. The next step was obvious—compare women and men as tokens—but the forum for doing this was elusive. Integral to Kanter's theory was the nontraditional setting in which tokens, be they female or male, were employed. The key was to find women and men doing the same work, but in work groups with oppositely skewed numbers. A ready-made opportunity presented itself when an undergraduate student of mine, Laura Sinnett, talked about her job at the St. Louis zoo (Yoder & Sinnett, 1985). She described three locations for concession stands: a gift shop staffed by only women, an isolated food stand run by a handful of men, and a main food location with a mix of female and male employees.</p> <p>We arranged to randomly assign the incoming group of new workers at the start of one summer: 2 men to the gift shop with 16 women; 1 woman with 6 men at the isolated location; and the remainder in the gender-balanced main location. Laura observed these groups throughout the summer, and participants completed surveys about their experiences and their relationships with other workers. As expected, the lone token woman never fit in with her group, spending as much of her break-time as possible at the gender-balanced main location. She earned a top performance evaluation but was not promoted, and she quit at the end of the summer.</p> <p>In contrast, our two token men fared well. Sociograms put them at the core of their skewed location's social network; they reported high levels of satisfaction; they were evaluated favorably; and, most convincingly for us, they were the only two members of their first-year group to be promoted. Given that we had randomly assigned these new workers, we found their promotion pattern especially supportive of our conviction about the power of social contexts. Since then, Christine Williams (1992) has replicated this outcome with men in four predominantly female occupations (nursing, elementary school teaching, librarianship, and social work). She dubbed the phenomenon the “glass escalator” to highlight the advantages of visibility for token White men. Proportional scarcity no longer appeared so gender-neutral.</p> <p>Armed with this understanding, I revisited Kanter's theory, writing a critique of this literature (Yoder, 1991). Here I argued that the influence of gender was pervasive throughout tokenism theory, including the construct of tokenism itself, its outcomes, and solutions to tokenism. Kanter had concentrated at the level of the job itself—looking at the gender composition of specific work groups—without taking into consideration the broader societal context in which these work groups operate. For example, women cadets were not just O's among X's who stood out and were different from the majority. Rather, women cadets brought a different status to the job by virtue of the very fact that they were women as well as violated our normative expectations about what kinds of people shoot guns, crawl in the mud, and lead soldiers. Judith Long Laws (1975) captured both these macrostructural implications in her description of tokens as “double deviates:” nontraditionally employed women who deviate first from androcentric norms by virtue of their gender and who deviate a second time by virtue of the gender-uncongeniality of their occupational pursuits. From this enlarged perspective, gender permeates the entire tokenism process, suggesting gendered definitions of tokenism, gendered outcomes, and gendered solutions.</p> <p>Gender Role Violations</p> <p>I started to think about the role of occupational deviance in the tokenism process. A quick overview of the contexts in which women tokens were studied—as salesmanagers, military cadets and enlisted personnel (Rustad, 1982), coal miners (Hammond & Mahoney, 1983), physicians (Floge & Merrill, 1985; Lorber, 1984), academicians (Young, Mackenzie, & Sherif, 1980), autoworkers (Gruber & Bjorn, 1982), policewomen (Gerber, 1996; Martin, 1994; Ott, 1989), correctional officers (Jurik, 1985; Zimmer, 1986), and transit workers (Swerdlow, 1989)—made it clear that these women not only worked with mostly men, but also violated occupational norms. Social psychologists have amassed convincing evidence that costs accompany social deviance, and indeed a 1978 vignette study by Fran Cherry and Kay Deaux found that negative outcomes accompanied occupational deviance for a stimulus person. When the stimulus person, Anne, was described as topping her medical school class and when John led his nursing school class, both were described unfavorably by undergraduate raters.</p> <p>A graduate student, Tom Schleicher, and I decided to conceptually replicate and update this study (Yoder & Schleicher, 1996). We duplicated the simple, vignette procedure of the original study, asking UW-Milwaukee undergraduates to read a short scenario describing Anne or John in traditional or nontraditional settings. Using presently skewed occupations, we portrayed Anne or John as leading their college classes in either engineering or nursing or topping their community college classes for electricians or day care providers. As we expected, Anne was perceived less positively when she was successful in a male-dominated occupation, was rated as less likeable and less attractive, and was socially distanced by students. In sum, at least part of the social isolation we saw among Kanter's salesmanagers and our military cadets seems to have resulted from others' perceptions of these tokens' occupational deviance.</p> <p>Interestingly, the same pattern did not result for our target, John, when he succeeded in day care and nursing. Our inappropriately employed John was regarded just as favorably as our occupationally congruent John. This is consistent with what we found at the St. Louis zoo: Men doing “women's” work are not rejected by their coworkers or, as we found here, by outside judges.</p> <p>Both women and men are aware of the costs of occupational deviance, so much so that they can project a pattern of tokenism outcomes that is consistent with the experiences reported by actual tokens. In another person perception study (Yoder, 1994), students read a vignette about a woman or a man who worked as either a nontoken or token. Raters expected token women, but not token men, to experience heightened visibility and a less favorable work atmosphere including sexual harassment, marginalization, and lack of support. Although far from conclusive, we might speculate that expectations such as these help maintain occupational segregation by discouraging women from breaking gendered occupational norms.</p> <p>The Role of Status Differences</p> <p>These patterns contributed to my growing realization that gender constructs different social contexts for women and for men. I have come to think of gender as a social construction (Gergen, 1985; Unger, 1989; West & Zimmerman, 1987)—something we do, something we create, in interaction with other people (Deaux & Major, 1987). In our culture, gender acts as a schema, giving us a way to organize and think about people (Bem, 1993), and it conveys status information (Berger, Fisek, Norman, & Zelditch, 1977; Ridgeway, Boyle, Kuipers, & Robinson, 1998). Thinking along these lines, might adding men to a group of women enhance the group's status, in contrast to infiltrating a group of men with lower-status women? Framing the question this way introduces a status differential that permeates the whole tokenism process (see Collins, 1998; Tolbert, Simons, Andrews, & Rhee, 1995). In my research teams, we have approached this question with two separate strands of research: one in which we manipulate the status of tokens and the second in which we explore the intersection of multiple statuses as markers of difference in skewed work groups.</p> <p>Manipulating the status of tokens. In our first attempt to manipulate status, we varied the status of token women in a pilot laboratory experiment (McDonald, Schweiger, Felch, & Yoder, 1997). We recruited participants from undergraduate classes by having them complete a short profile which included their first name, age, educational status, hobbies, and perceived strengths and weaknesses. The ostensible purpose of our study was to explore “how groups make decisions.” We followed up with phone contacts telling women that they had been randomly selected to lead a group of six people on a decision-making task. When each woman arrived at the lab room, it was set up to accommodate a group; she was shown examples of the problems they would be doing; and she reviewed the profile sheets supposedly completed by the other members of her soon-to-be-arriving group. These profiles enacted the independent variables in the study by manipulating the gender composition and status of the group. Three conditions were created: a nontoken setting in which the leader was the same age and education as her all-female group; a gender token setting in which the leader expected to lead a group of all men of the same age and education as herself; and a high-status gender token condition in which the leader expected to lead a group of all younger, less educated men (high school students).</p> <p>Not surprisingly, both token groups expected to stand out and to be stereotyped, more so than the nontoken group. However, the social costs of being a gender token diminished for the higher-status tokens, despite their proportional scarcity. High-status gender tokens were no different from nontokens in expected performance pressures and their feelings about leading the group—they were equally confident and comfortable, reported low levels of anxiety, and felt they would be effective. In contrast, gender tokens differed from nontokens along these dimensions.</p> <p>This pattern suggests that the unfavorable social costs of being a female token can be negated by enhancing the status of the token. Indeed, it may be this enhanced status that wipes out these negative tokenism outcomes for token men. Technically, we might expect token men whose status has been lowered to experience outcomes parallel to those of token women. We have just completed data collection for a study that manipulates the status of male and female tokens to test these ideas. If my hunch is correct, higher-status token women will experience outcomes as favorable as nontoken women in contrast to lower-status token men who will fare worse than both token and nontoken men.</p> <p>The intersection of status. The second strand of research I have pursued expands on the idea of gender as a status indicator to consider its intersection with other status markers of difference (specifically, race/ethnicity) in work groups. Starting with a vignette study, we asked African American and White women undergraduates to project outcomes for women targets of their own race/ethnicity (Yoder, Aniakudo, & Berendsen, 1996). These targets were described in work groups such that they fell into one of four conditions: nontoken, or token by virtue of their gender alone, race alone, or both race and gender. For example, the target in the last condition would be an African American woman working with a dominant group of White men.</p> <p>Measures of social atmosphere and colleagueship were less favorable for tokens than nontokens, and social atmosphere worsened even further when difference was based on both race/ethnicity and gender. There also was a strong race main effect such that African American women projected more negative outcomes for their African American women targets than did White women, including worse social atmosphere, lower colleagueship, and heightened stress. These findings argue that race/ethnicity too is a status indicator, and that gender does not operate independently of it. It was this confluence of race/ethnicity and gender in these findings that took us to our next field project: surveys and interviews with African American and White women firefighters nationwide.</p> <p>Firefighting in the United States presented an ideal setting in which to continue our research: The occupation employs over 95% men; it has strong masculine connotations (even the common language is gender-specific: firemen); and it demands social interaction, both in the crisis situations that define the job and in the day-to-day boredom of 24-hour shifts with plenty of confined waiting.</p> <p>Twenty-two African American women firefighters nationwide completed a 20-page survey and one-hour phone interview conducted by doctoral student Patricia Aniakudo; 24 White women did the same with another doctoral student, Lynne Berendsen. Our analyses began with the African American women (Yoder & Aniakudo, 1996; 1997) then just recently extended to the White women firefighters (Yoder & Berendsen, 2001). Methodologically, I think this is important because it puts Black women at the center, not the margins, of our analyses (Yoder & Kahn, 1993). We heeded bell hooks (1984).</p> <p>The most obvious consequence of studying token difference based in both race and gender is that the domain of relationships expands beyond simply tokens and dominants to include tokens and three groups of others. For the women in our samples these relationships involve White men, African American men, and other-race women. Strain is evident in all of these for both Black and White women firefighters.</p> <p>As the percentage of White men increased in Black women's firehouses, African American women reported less encouragement from team members to seek promotion, less favorable reactions to their own promotions, less social discussions with teammates, less perceived acceptance as a colleague, less acceptance by coworkers' families, and less shared leisure time. These outcomes concentrate on social atmosphere and colleagueship. Parallel correlations between the proportion of White men and negative outcomes were not found in the survey data from White women firefighters.</p> <p>African American and White women's relations with African American male colleagues were mixed. On the one hand, Black and White women described a bond of shared oppression uniting them with Black men. On the other hand, both African American and White women reported that Black men colluded with White men by trading on their shared gender to isolate women.</p> <p>Although only one of the Black women and nine of the White women in our samples worked directly with a woman of the other race, most encountered each other in positions related to firefighting, such as paramedics and dispatchers. African American women and a handful of White women lamented the lack of unity among women. Black women attributed this disunity to both racism and the willingness of White women, paralleling that of Black men, to trade on their racial solidarity with higher-status White men. A few White women openly discounted race, describing their interactions with Black women as “…the same as working with any other women.” The invisibility of race is a luxury afforded only to the privileged (McIntosh, 1995).</p> <p>In addition to expanding the pool of social relations to be considered, these studies highlight how race/ethnicity and gender intersect (West & Fenstermaker, 1995) to shape the form tokenism outcomes assume. Kanter (1977) painted a picture of social isolation as something akin to benign neglect. She argued that because tokens were perceptually different from dominants (that is, O's instead of X's), dominants simply did not know what to do, so they left tokens alone. A very different scenario emerges from our datasets with women firefighters who described both direct and indirect attempts to keep them in subordinated positions through active exclusion.</p> <p>Direct comments make it undeniably clear that the target is unwelcome and that there is little hope for acceptance. Indirect indicators of exclusion are much more subtle, but they work to send a not-so-benign message of marginalization. These took the form of insufficient instruction, silence, close and often punitive supervision, lack of support, and stereotyping. Although both Black and White women reported instances of each of these, a handful of only White women actively denied having these experiences. How each indirect indicator was enacted often varied along racial/ethnic lines. For example, stereotyping of Black women as self-reliant resulted in withheld assistance. Stereotyping for White women involved images of fragility that were reinforced with paternalistic overprotection. Thus African American women typically felt overburdened; White women, under-burdened by their colleagues.</p> <p>This series of studies argues then that tokenism is far from a neutral process. Rather, the status of the characteristics which distinguish tokens from dominant group members makes a difference in the valence of both projected and actual outcomes. The negative outcomes associated with token numbers do not result from proportional scarcity alone but rather from underrepresentation combined with lower status. Two intimately intertwined and influential status markers are gender and race/ethnicity. Thus the form tokenism outcomes themselves take reflects these status influences.</p> <p>Remedies</p> <p>The final question I will address has to do with remedies. Given the pervasiveness of gender throughout tokenism processes, Kanter's (1977) solution of balancing numbers by adding O's to groups dominated by X's is overly simplistic. By ignoring the status implications of gender, Kanter failed to consider how groups are likely to react to infiltration by lower-status “others,” Herbert Blalock (1967), who studied racial integration, perceptively predicted that such intrusions will be greeted with heightened levels of discriminatory behavior in order to limit the power gains of the growing lower-status minority. A consensus among tokenism researchers is coalescing that argues that groups need to move toward 35% or more representation of former tokens to eliminate tokenism consequences (Collins, 1998; Tolbert et al., 1995). Given this threshold, many groups are likely to remain skewed so that tokenism outcomes persist.</p> <p>My thinking along these lines prodded me to consider ways to make tokens more effective in groups. Starting in the lab, I designed a simple three-condition experiment (Yoder, Schleicher, & McDonald, 1998). I wanted a masculine task since this simulates the real-life analog of women in nontraditional occupations who both work mostly with men and do traditionally masculine work. The task I settled on was the “Lost on the Moon” exercise (Hall, 1971). Role players are asked to imagine that they are lost on the moon 200 miles from their mother ship. They need to prioritize 15 items in their order of usefulness for helping them to make it back safely. An ideal feature of this task is that groups generally perform better than individuals, even the best-scoring individual in the group, because group input and discussion often bring forth perspectives not considered individually.</p> <p>In the baseline, control condition, we simply appointed a token woman to lead a group of 5-7 men doing the lost-on-the-moon exercise. Each individual completed the task first, then each group was allotted 20 minutes to do it together, agreeing on one set of rankings. The woman was seated at the head of the table and was given the group form to record their answers (Porter, Geis, & Jennings, 1983). Thus, her position as appointed leader was affirmed both verbally by the experimenter and through situational cues.</p> <p>In the second condition, the appointed woman leader arrived a half-hour before the group, she took the test individually, then she was given NASA's rationale for their rankings. In other words, she was given training directly relevant to the demands of the task. We colluded with the woman not to tell the group about her training, although she was free to use her knowledge as she saw fit. This is our trained-leader condition. In the final condition, we duplicated the procedure for the trained leader, then a male experimenter announced to the group that the leader had prior training that made her an expert at the task at hand. In this condition, the appointed leader was trained and legitimated by the experimenter, who simulated the role of a male agent of the organization (acting something like, a boss).</p> <p>There were no differences in how our women leaders did on the task on their first exposure; there also were no differences in the men's individual scores across conditions. Both trained leaders improved significantly from their pre- to post-training scores. In other words, the training worked. However, only the trained, legitimated leaders were able to successfully influence their groups. Groups led by trained, legitimated leaders scored better than our appointed-only control; groups lead by trained-only leaders did not.</p> <p>I especially like this study because it avoids a deficiency model of token women. Rather than arguing that token women need to work to empower themselves, say for example by enhancing their expertise, these findings suggest that the status-enhancement of tokens, albeit competent tokens, rests in the hands of organizations whose high-status members can legitimate women (also see Brown & Geis, 1984; DeMatteo, Dobbins, Myers, & Facteau, 1996).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our story has come a long way from gender-indeterminate O's and X's, presenting a much richer picture of tokenism processes and remedies (diagrammed in Figure 1). Skewed proportions indeed rest at the core of the causes of negative tokenism outcomes as Kanter (1977) insightfully observed, but these are themselves solidly embedded within contexts of occupational role deviance and subordinated status and power (Box A), both of which are inextricably gendered and may intersect with other markers of social status. These three contexts work in concert to produce a number of tokenism outcomes (Box B). The casual link between Box A and Box B can be disrupted when the embedded interventions in Box C occur in unison. These interventions parallel the elements described in Box A and recognize their interrelationships. Thus, for example, changing proportions on the job is effective only if it occurs in conjunction with redefined occupational roles and status enhancement.</p> <p>My overarching message is that context matters. To understand women and work, we cannot assume that women and men doing the same gender-skewed job, such as firefighting, experience the same context. Instead, I think it is critical to understand the status implications of being female or being male, how gender status combines with other status markers, and the impact of deviation from gender stereotypes defining occupational appropriateness. Thus, to effectively disrupt the cycle that produces and sustains negative tokenism outcomes, both individuals and organizations must address each of these confounded elements simultaneously. Changing proportions as Kanter suggested is just a start, and one that cannot be approached singularly. Rather, effective interventions must work to balance proportions as well as level the status of workers and redefine occupational stereotypes.</p> <p>Initial submission: September 17, 2001</p> <p>Initial acceptance: October 18, 2001</p> <p>Final acceptance: October 22, 2001</p> <p>The author wishes to thank Lynn Collins for her helpful review.</p> <p>DIAGRAM: Fig. 1. Maintaining and disrupting tokenism processes. Skewed proportions embedded within social roles dictating appropriate occupations as well as within subordinated social status and power combine to produce negative tokenism outcomes. 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  Data: Research on tokenism processes is reviewed and coalesces around two conclusions. First, gender constructs different social contexts for token women and for token men. Second, gender is most usefully conceptualized as a status variable, not something internal to the individual. Gender serves as a status marker such that women's subordinated status intersects with other indicators of status, such as race/ethnicity, and token difference to produce negative and variable outcomes for women not experienced by similarly underrepresented men. Thus, reducing negative tokenism outcomes, most notably unfavorable social atmosphere and disrupted colleagueship, can be done effectively only by taking gender status and stereotyping into consideration. These findings have applied implications for women's full inclusion in male-dominated occupations. (Contains 1 figure.)
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