I hope this is the right forum, but I’ve always wondered why on tv shows there is often only one woman. The Daily Show. M.A.S.H (Margaret Houlihan). Seinfeld (Elaine). Star Trek TOS (Uhura, yeah, I know, there’s Yeoman Rand and the nurse.). Is it like putting two female animals in a pen that will turn on each other, cannibalize each other? There’s ‘only room for ONE Queen?’ … there are satellite females, special guest stars, etc. But in a line up for publicity, there are several men and the one token woman, never room for more than one?
You’ve identified shows from the 1960s through the 1980s.
In that era women were for the (male) audience to look at, not to be people.
That’s now 40 to 60 years ago! Do you have any more recent examples?
If the character is on screen for a significant percentage of time and plays an important role, not sure this qualifies as a “token woman”? If so, the Daily Show is a bad example. (Samantha Bee, Kristen Schaal, Nancy Walls, Desi Lyric, Jessica Williams, Olivia Munn, etc.)
It’s at least partly just selection bias. Gilligan’s Island had 3 women out of a cast of 7. The Brady Bunch was evenly split, or favoring women if you counted the housekeeper. Laverne and Shirley was two women. The Golden Girls were all women. And of course plenty of shows have exactly two leads, one man and one woman: You can’t really call the one woman in that case a “token”. And the selection bias is even stronger when you consider that for most shows, there’s no hard cutoff for what counts as “main cast”, so you can stop counting after the first woman.
I’ll also note that two of your examples feature male-dominated professions, military and exploration.
Star Trek TOS had a fairly small main cast, and you could argue that Nimoy (non-human), Sulu (Asian), Uhura (African American and woman) and Chekov (commie) were all tokens in one form or another. If you have a majority cast of tokens, are they really tokens?
Rat Patrol probably didn’t even have a “token” woman. But Hogan’s Heros did. That was the least problematic thing about that little show.
Designing Women, with a token male.
Yes, actually; it’s just that Trek was well written enough that they were actual characters, not tokens.
But I do recall from my childhood that there were lots of shows that had token characters that were just “The Woman”, “The Black Guy”, “The Asian Guy” and so on. And whose characterization ended there.
Stop making me feel so old!
Seinfeld came out in 1989.
The top 10 shows of 1989 were:
1 The Cosby Show (multiple female characters)
2 Roseanne (multiple female characters)
3 Cheers (multiple female characters)
4 A Different World (multiple female characters)
5 America’s Funniest Home Videos
6 The Golden Girls (multiple female characters)
7 60 Minutes
8 The Wonder Years (multiple female characters)
9 Empty Nest (multiple female characters)
10 Monday Night Football
Not much of a trend…
I think this is what TVTropes refers to as “The Smurfette Principle.”
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSmurfettePrinciple
Elaine is a decent example because the original conception of Seinfeld didn’t have a woman character; the network required it.
NBC executives felt the show was too male-centric, and demanded that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David add a woman to the cast as a condition for commissioning the show, as revealed in the commentary on the Season 1 and 2 DVD.
Margaret was always a part of MASH back to the novel - that makes it hard to see her as a token (there were other nurses in the background, and other doctors out of focus in the series as well).
Echoes of the Bechdel test, which applied to movies. A movie passes the Bechdel test if it meets 3 criteria:
- The movie has to have at least two women in it,
- who talk to each other,
- about something other than a man.
Wiki:
The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of over 10,000 films classified by whether they pass the test.[39] As of 2026, it listed 57% of films in its database as passing all three of the test’s requirements, 10% as failing one, 22% as failing two, and 11% as failing all three.[40]
Writer Charles Stross noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies.
538 noted that films passing the Bechdel test had a 37% higher return on investment. I say good writing is underappreciated in Hollywood.
IRL, Females only made up about 10% of a MASH unit.
So, that’s two, right? The Nurse is Christine Chapel.
Mostly, I think.
Surely, women talking about marriage wouldn’t count, because that’s talking about a man? I mean, unless they’re lesbians, but I would expect that movies featuring lesbians would probably pass on other grounds.
Some versions of the test also require that both women be named.
Smaller than we remember, actually. In the first season only Shatner and Nimoy were signed to appear in every episode.Starting in the second season, DeForest Kelley was signed for every episode. Uhura, despite her relatively small part, actually appeared in more episodes than Scotty.
I tracked down the citation. It’s from this 2008 blog post :
I bring this up as a point of interest, because of what it says about the blind spots of popular entertainment. Most Hollywood movies fail this test; if you extend #3 only slightly, to read “About something besides men or marriage or babies”, you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass-entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test.
That reads more like a grumble than an empirical measurement. That’s permitted in blogs, but it should not have been cited uncritically in Nina Power’s 2009 work, One-Dimensional Woman IMO.
I have an example, but it’s from British television, not American. It’s the show Mock the Week. It consists of six comedians (not the same ones each episode) who make jokes based on the suggestions they’re given. There was a lot of criticism for a while that they only had one of them being a woman (and sometimes none of them were). They’ve slowly gone away from this.
Fascinating.
[somebody had to say it 
].
Setting aside the oddballs like The Menagerie w Capt. Pike I’d have assumed the Big 5 (Kirk, Spock, Scotty, McCoy, and Uhuru) appeared with speaking parts in every episode. And also the remaining bridge crew (Sulu & Chekov); albeit perhaps only briefly seen from behind with no lines.
I’m not sure I could stand to go back and watch a TOS episode and destroy the soft-focus childhood memories resting comfortably in the sludge down in my mental bilge, but it would be interesting to see who does, and doesn’t, appear in which season 1 or 2 episodes.
In the first few seasons of The Big Bang Theory Penny was the only female cast member, but there were several female returning characters. Bernadette was introduced in Season 3 and made a permanent cast member along with Amy in Season 6. But Penny was not really a token those first few seasons, she drove the plot.