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Image by cartoonist xkcd. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Given his cultural heritage (iconic cartoonist for the fiendishly brilliant nerd set) this comic by xkcd is all the more poignant. It’s not that there are no women nerds, but they are rare enough that when they do appear they appear to the predominantly male cohort as tokens of their gender rather than specific individuals from their gender.

And while this may be obvious to everyone else on the planet, and since I’m really supposed to be studying for yet another exam in my combined interpersonal communication theory / sex education / women’s studies program, I’m going to procrastinate by reinforcing (for myself) something I’d maybe sort of thought about before I began my course but hadn’t really thought about much.

In a 1993 McGraw-Hill text called Women & Gender: A Feminist Psychology, in a chapter called “Gender, Status, and Power” the authors, Unger & Crawford, discuss the issue of tokenism thusly:

Obviously a woman is much more likely to be seen as a representative of the social category “female” when she is the single person of her sex in a group. ... They are more visible and isolated than the men who, because of their numerical dominance, determine the culture of the group. They are likely to be defined in stereotypically feminine terms, and they are likely to be seen by themselves and others as representing women’s issues rather than the interests of the group as a whole.

Because of their distinctiveness within a group, tokens may be evaluated unfairly. Even expectations of differential treatment by majority-group members may, under some conditions, produce poorer performance by token than non-token individuals.

The following interesting experiment demonstrates how tokenism can be induced in anyone regardless of his or her social category. ... College students were led to believe that they were sharing their views on everyday topics with three other students (actually confederates who were present on videotape) who were either all in the same sex as the student or all of the other sex. In a later memory task, token participants remembered fewer opinions expressed in the group than did nontokens.

These individuals had not been treated differently because of their token status (the use of videotapes ruled out any possibility of differences in behavior by other members of the group). Preoccupation with their distinctiveness may have distracted their attention from what was going on within the group. The members of the majority group can, in contrast, ignore their social-group membership and attend to what is going on.

...

Tokenism, however, exerts its effects through cultural dominance, which is a constant. Those who dominate a field of action over time come to determine the rules of interaction for strangers who chance to penetrate the boundaries. Neither their culture nor their power is neutralized by [experimentally localized] numerical reshuffling.

Got that? So not only would an isolated individual (in this case the woman doing calculus or physics) be evaluated by majority-group standards (even, as in this case, when it’s a one-on-one situation) the isolated individual’s performance may suffer because of the added burden of awareness of their minority-representative status.

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Another personal point that’s just sunk in. While I obviously never questioned the implicit punch line of the comic, which is that the accuser is an unfair stereotyper and tokenizer. But since I haven’t studied enough math to know whether the male accuser in the comic is correct about the accusee’s math or simply full of crap I assumed his accusation is valid.

If I really was the only non-mathemetician who made that assumption then all I can say in my own defense is that the power of stereotypes is such that they get you even when you’re wary of them, antagonistic towards them, and on the lookout for them.

Bummer.

[For the record a little Googling on elements of the formula suggests the accuser is right in the sense that the integral of x squared is nowhere near pi. But my self-identified stereotype alert stands since I didn’t know that, at all, at all, when I saw the comic. —fl]