Kanter's theories about tokenization in the workplace are primarily directed at explaining how women are viewed as the gender ratio varies. What are findings that examine who women may present themselves differently as their composition of the social group changes? The thing that made me think of this is that it's not only true that women as a distinct group are most visible around that 15% marker (according to kanter, anyways...psychology of contrast), but it's also true that my self-awareness as a woman (cuing of gender) varies with the composition of my companions. The kind of relationship surely alters the cocktail as well -- work relations vs friendships, for example.

So...hmm...how to more concrete. Does the blackness of a black dot in a field of red dots come to attention more than the blackness of a black dot in a field composed of 30% black dots and 70% red dots? I would guess yes. What if instead of 70% red dots the 70% dots of a random distribution of like...(m/10)+ colors (where m=# of dots)? In that case, I would wonder if the black dots might have a sense of groupness as the largest minority, despite the minority status. That seems more obvious now that I've fleshed it out in those terms.

To reframe the first scenario a bit, does the blackness of a black dot come to attention more when 99% of the dots are black? Certainly the black probably gets framed as "normal" as opposed to aberrant, but still, gender is cued. So in the real world, how does the cueing of gender vary as the gender ratio swings from one extreme to the other (male saturated to female saturated). I wonder if there would be interesting similarities since the same notions of gender get cued by the extreme nature of both situations.

Sorta related to the vaccuum thread, but only tangentially, it does seem the demographics should influence design and creativity not necessarily because of socially encourages knowledges and concerns (though certainly possible, harder to predict?) but also through just cueing a different range of concepts.

Maybe the thing to creativity isn't so much gender equity as just variance along all dimensions. In fact, that's a lot more it, I think. And once "pale and male" is no longer the norm, then will pale and male become the aberration that may generate our "unconventional creativity"?

Blah. Confusing self. But I feel like this is an interesting quagmire to me.

Bob Sutton's book "Weird Ideas That Work" is a biz press sort of book that actually seems pretty grounded in research as these things go, and that research probably should drill into these issues if it doesn't already.