The Tipping Point When Minority Views Take Over

In the 1970s, the business professor Rosabeth Kanter published an influential account of an American company that had recently recruited women to its sales team. The quality of those women’s working lives, Kanter noted astutely, depended on their representation. When they made up just 15 percent of the workforce, they faced stereotyping, harassment, isolation, disproportionate performance pressures, and other disadvantages. But when they made up something like 35 percent of the workplace, they started shifting its culture in their favor by forming alliances and establishing a counterculture.

Decades of work in sociology, physics, and other disciplines have supported this idea. Small groups of people can indeed flip firmly established social conventions, as long as they reach a certain critical, , and the ; now, these issues all enjoy majority support.