Tokenism in Context: Unpacking Token Women Directors in the Corporate Boardroom

ABSTRACT Tokenism in the corporate boardroom is a contemporary human resource management (HRM) issue for academics, practitioners and policy makers. This essay critiques the existing understanding of the concepts of tokens and tokenism in mainstream management and corporate governance scholarship within the particular context of women on corporate boards. We argue that extant tokenism scholarship in this literature adopts a reductive logic that equates tokens with tokenism and assumes numerical underrepresentation of women as an implied signal of lack of power. This tendency fails to fully reflect the latent power of tokens as agents of change. Integrating perspectives from socio‐psychological theories, we posit that the likelihood of experiencing tokenism depends on three factors: the salience of gender identity for a token woman director, the salience of gender identity to her board role, and the degree of her social integration with the male‐dominated board. Accordingly, we propose a categorisation of women directors—(1) the Inert Token, (2) the Paralysed Token, (3) the Queen Bee Token, and (4) the Catalyst Token—that we argue better captures the behavioural variations of and differentiated outcomes for token women directors on corporate boards. This has important implications for HRM initiatives, particularly those aimed at promoting diversity and inclusivity at upper echelon levels.