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ied what happens to women when they do manage to get closer to the top, andI uncovered a range of familiar situations. Male managers who could not accepta woman as a colleague without constantly reminding her that she was "different."Women who could not make themselves heard in committee meetings and whofelt left out. Bright women who hid their accomplishments. A female sales executivewho felt that most women should not be hired for jobs like hers. A womanscientist who let another woman in her unit flounder without help. A woman facultymember who brought cookies to department meetings and mothered her colleagues.All the characters were there, dressed in their sex roles. Yet 1 saw that even sothe play was not about sex. It was about numbers. These women were all tokens,alone or nearly alone in a world of male peers and bosses. When people take on a tokenstatus—whether they are female scientists or male nurses or black executives ina white company—they share certain experiences that influence their behavior.Tokens, by definition, stand out from the crowd. In one company I studied, thefirst 12 women to go to work among 400 men set the rumor mill in motion. Theycaused more talk and attracted more attention, usually for their physical attributes,than new male employees. The men tended to evaluate the women against their imageof the ideal female rather than the ideal colleague, and the women, under relentlessscrutiny, felt they could not afford to make mistakes.When the token is a black man among whites, a similar reaction occurs. ShellyTayler and Susan Fiske of Harvard set up an experiment in which they played a tapeof group discussions to students. Then they showed pictures of the group and askedthe students for their impressions of the discussants. Sometimes the photos showeda lone black in an all-white group and sometimes a mixed black-white group. Taylorand Fiske found that the students paid disproportionate attention to the token: theyoveremphasized his prominence in the group and exaggerated his personality traits.But when the students responded to integrated groups, they were no more likely torecall information about blacks than about whites, and they evaluated the attributesof the blacks as the same of those of the whites.
HOSTILE, RAUNCHY TALK
Tokens get attention, but they are isolated on the outskirts of the group. They are remindedconstantly of how different they are, and what their proper place should be.Other employees sometimes respond to tokens by closing ranks and exaggeratingthe in-group culture. In several groups of sales trainees I observed, the men's talkgot raunchier when token women were present, though they also added elaborateapologies and bows in the women's direction. Tokens have to listen to jokes aboutpeople like them, and they face the subtle pressures to side with the majority againsttheir kind. Male nurses report the same kind of disguised hostility from the womenthey work with, who constantly remind them that they do not belong and pose loyaltytests to see if they will side with women against other men. The token is neverquite trusted by the rest of the group.To win the group's trust, tokens often resort to acting out the stereotypical rolethat members of their sex or race are supposed to play. These roles require them todeny parts of themselves that don't fit the majority group's assumptions, and theymake it difficult for the tokens to be ordinary workers doing their jobs. Tokenwomen, for instance, may