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This article provides an analysis of the gendering process in product innovation. Interwoven into this process is the encapsulation of a token position. The article expands and deepens the tokenism theory through a discussion of gender in the innovation process. The article draws from recent and classical theories of gender, ranging from gendering approaches to Acker's theory of gendered organisations and processes within organisations, and Moss Kanter's tokenism theory. The main objective of the article is to address this gap in the tokenicsm discussion and introduce a new concept of “processual tokenism”.

The article builds on an intensive single case study and uses a narrative methodology and approach in the analysis of the data of the case in question. The primary data used in the narratives consist of interview data. The article also uses documents and reports as secondary data in the narrative construction. The approach used is theoretical, interpretative and qualitative.

The article provides a detailed narrative of the intertwined nature of the gender position in an organisation and the invention process. One of the outcomes is that the gendering of a product is triggered by tokenism, and that gendering of a product can be interpreted also as a deliberate and successful process. The article contributes to the tokenism theorizing.

The limitations of the article may relate to the specificity of the innovation process in chemical industry that are different to other industrial fields.

The article does not have direct practical implications.

The article contributes to the theory of tokenism by providing an updated and extended version of tokenism and naming it as “processual tokenism”. Furthermore, the article contributes to the debates on gendered organisations by focusing on gendering through tokenism and the persistence of male dominance. Finally, the article contributes to gender theories by introducing the idea and analysing of how the gendering of a product innovation takes place.

Hospitality firms adopted diverse hiring policies and public declarations of support for LGBTQ+ causes through brand activism. The impact of activism on LGBTQ+ employees’ workplace experiences has been ambiguous. This study aims to examine the hospitality and tourism employees’ perceptions of gay and lesbian leaders as token-hires among hospitality employees and the spillover effect on company’s motives for hiring the leaders. This study further explores LGBTQ+ employees’ reactions to token-hiring as a form of activism, and how workplace interactions as passing/revealing LGBTQ+ individuals shaped their career development.

This research adopted a sequential mixed-methods design. An experiment examines how employees judge gay vs lesbian hospitality leaders as token hires, contingent on their own gender identity. It further tests the conditional mediation of tokenism on company’s egoistic motives for activism. A qualitative study explores the reactions to token-hiring as activism from the perspective of LGBTQ+ leaders who reflect on their own careers and workplace experiences.

Tokenism in the hospitality workplace is recognized as the phenomenon attributed to groups at the intersection of identities (e.g. gay men). Findings demonstrate the spillover effect of tokenism perceptions of gay male leaders by other men on company’s egoistic motives for activism. This effect is not observed for a lesbian female leader. Results from interviews suggest that hospitality and tourism LGBTQ+ employees predominantly take the post-gay vs political approach when managing their sexual identities at work and feel ambivalent toward token-hiring as LGBTQ+ brand activism.

This research contributes to understanding workplace challenges of LGBTQ+ employees and how they are perceived by others contingent on gender identity. It also explores the role of tokenism in their experiences.

Burnout has been linked to a myriad of negative organizational and individual health outcomes which threaten employee and organizational well-being. This study examines how unique features of diversity and inclusion (D&I) work are related to burnout.

Participants were recruited using network and convenience sampling strategies. A total of 64 full-time employees whose primary responsibility is to implement the D&I strategy for their organization provided useable data for analysis. Participants completed measures of burnout, role ambiguity, role conflict, subjective experiences of tokenism, and top management support. Measures were administered online via Qualtrics.

Results suggest lack of clear job duties, conflicting job demands, lack of top management support, and experiences of tokenism are associated with D&I professionals' experiences of burnout. The current study, however, indicates that while D&I professional experience higher levels of exhaustion than other professionals, they also experience greater professional efficacy, which suggests D&I roles are both challenging and rewarding.

Results suggest organizational leaders may mitigate employee burnout by providing clear support to and role definitions for D&I professionals.

This study is the first to explore burnout experiences among D&I professionals. Additionally, this study examines how burnout experiences are associated with role dysfunctions, top management support, and subjective experiences of tokenism.

Situated in the context of India, where women’s representation on corporate boards remains low, this study aims to explore whether and how tokenism impacts the behaviours of female directors.

The boardroom experiences and perceptions of 14 women directors are explored through semi-structured interviews and analysed using an inductive and interpretive process. Also, to get a counter perspective and avoid the social desirability bias from the women participants’ responses, 16 men directors are interviewed.

The study finds that, as gender minorities, women directors' visibility on boards can create performance pressures on these women. To counter gender-based prejudices, women directors consciously alter their behaviours and project both male and female traits consistent with the director role. By doing so, women directors overcome tokenistic stereotypes and are accepted as part of the director in-group, irrespective of their numeric representation on the board.

The research has implications for governments attempting to increase women’s board presence through affirmative actions and for firms aiming to improve the gender diversity of their board composition.

These findings present an alternative perspective on women directors’ board behaviour by exploring the applicability of Western trends on tokenism and critical mass in the context of India, adding to the vast body of literature concerned with minorities on corporate boards.

This chapter utilises the analogy of ‘parasitical resistance’ (Fisher, 2020) to explore how young people act and interact in ‘adult’ contexts, where they are welcome as young people but still subordinated because of their age, and sometimes their gender. The analysis of young people’s participation in the Greater Manchester Youth Combined Authority suggests that young people who participate in formal, adult spaces need to be able to find the ‘play in the system’ to be heard and to be involved in decision-making. In this sense, the young people embraced a form of ‘parasitism’ and developed tactics to ‘effect subversion from within hegemonic structures’ (Fisher, 2020). This new paradigm argues that resistance is less likely to be found in a radical activism now and is more likely to be found instead in the mutually exploitative relations between dominant hosts (in this case, ‘adults’) giving of their power just enough, and ‘parasitical’ actors (in this case, young people) taking only as much as they need for their own ends. The chapter does not argue that young people are ‘parasites’ at the adult table but, rather, it acknowledges young people must find ways to ‘play the game’ in spaces where longstanding tools of radical resistance have limited effect. The ‘play’ is not unproblematic, however, and the chapter concludes that young people need more than just ‘being heard’ and contributing to something that is achievable, but not especially disruptive or redistributive. Instead, involvement of young people should be focused on achieving genuine parity that can benefit as many marginalised and precarious young people as possible.

The purpose of this study was to examine the boundary conditions of Kanter's (1977) tokenism theory as applied to the gender wage gap. The authors aimed to discover if there was a point where the relationship between the percentage of women in a job category and the gender wage gap changed, and, if so, where the threshold was located and what was the nature of the shift in relationship.

The authors used the Andrews’ (1993) threshold effects technique. Using 22 separate years of publicly available Canadian wage data, they examined the relationship between the percentage of females in 40 unique occupational categories and the female-to-male earnings ratio (for a total of 880 observations).

The results showed the existence of a threshold point, and that early gains in percent female within an occupation, up to approximately 14% female in the occupation, associate with strong gains in the female-to-male wage ratio. However, beyond that point, further gains in percent female associate with smaller improvements in the female-to-male wage ratio.

The findings are useful in understanding the dynamics of occupational group gender composition, potential theoretical reasons for the nuances in relationship, as well as opportunities that may facilitate more equitable outcomes.

The results show that, though improvements were made above and below the threshold point, enhancements in the wage gap are actually larger when there are less women in the job category (e.g. tokens).

This study aims to unpack the progress of board gender diversity among the 3,000 largest US listed firms by market capitalization (i.e. Russell 3000 Index). This study extrapolates four classifications of firms based on the number of women in the boardroom: zero women, one or two women, three plus women and gender balanced. The purpose of this study is to examine where progress has and has not been made, why firms plateau and an agenda for the future.

This study first provides a summative overview of the literature on the benefits of board gender diversity. It then examines progress according to the four classifications, each of which have theoretical underpinnings for whether or not firms can reap the strategic benefits of gender-diverse boardrooms.

Several indices of US publicly traded companies now have women holding between 30% and 33% of the seats in the boardroom. By examining the spread of women on boards according to the four classifications, this study extrapolates three key insights: firms experiencing tokenism (i.e. one or two women in the boardroom) do not have enough women to reap the strategic benefits of diverse boardrooms; firms that have reached a critical mass (three women in the boardroom) are at an impasse and may risk plateauing; and gender-balanced firms are elevated to the status of being role models for other firms. Calls for action and associated action plans accompany these insights.

This study reminds managers and directors of the strategic benefits of gender-diverse boards and offers three critical insights that boards can use to classify what stage they are at on the path toward board gender equality. Based on their classification, calls for action and action plans offer guidance to firms.

This study shifts away from focusing on the average percentage of board seats held by women across all firms and offers new insights on the progress that firms have made according to the number of women in their boardroom.

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of Texas female police officers toward their colleagues. Further, the study measures respondents’ perceptions regarding work‐related stress. An independent sample t‐test analysis was conducted while controlling for the percentage of female officers working at participating Texas law enforcement agencies. Overall, the findings suggest that the percentage of female officers employed in a particular law enforcement agency did not produce a statistically significant impact on respondents’ perceptions of their male/female counterparts or stress‐related issues.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the change in pension fund board diversity after self-regulation was introduced, and investigate which pension fund characteristics influence compliance with self-regulation. In addition, the authors analyze whether compliance might be achieved by tokenism.

The authors hand-collect pension fund and pension fund board data of the largest (by assets) 200 pension funds in the Netherlands. The authors compare descriptive statistics on board diversity, perform statistical tests on these, and perform non-linear regression techniques to investigate which pension fund characteristics influence compliance.

The findings are fourfold. First, over the past three years, pension fund boards have only marginally improved on gender and age diversity. In April 2014, still more than 35 percent of the funds had no women on the board, and an overwhelming 60 percent had no members below 40 years of age. This indicates that self-regulation in the pension fund industry so far has not been effective for the industry as a whole. Second, the authors find that pension funds that have larger boards are more likely to have at least one woman on the board or at least one member below 40 years of age. Third, boards of pension funds with more assets are less likely to have young board members. Fourth, boards with at least one female have a higher probability of also having at least one member below 40 years, which is suggestive of tokenism.

Based on Hirschman’s (1970) theory of voice and exit, the authors expect that pension fund boards would be more diverse than corporate boards. However, the authors find that this is not the case. Second, given the importance of generational value transfers in pension fund policy decisions, the authors expect that age is a more important diversity characteristic than gender for pension fund boards in the Netherlands. Again, the data does not support this prediction.

Consistent with the literature on diversity in corporate boards, the authors find that diverse boards are on average larger. This suggests that, all other things equal, small boards might want to reconsider whether increasing their size would lead to more diversity and hence to more voice for participants that cannot exit the pension scheme. If larger funds hesitate to include young members because of their lack of relevant skills, then the authors would recommend setting up a platform to educate young candidates and prepare them for board membership. Forced independent auditor verification, as in the UK, might be a fruitful action the regulator could enforce on pension funds going forward. However, if that also does not lead to a significant improvement, compulsory diversity quota might be the only option left for policy makers.

This paper contributes to the literature in at least three ways. First, the authors analyze whether self-regulation on diversity in pension fund boards has been effective. Second, the authors determine which pension fund characteristics are associated with more board diversity. Third, the authors shed light on tokenism in pension fund board composition: Diversity might be obtained through installing diversity tokens, which are individuals who have multiple diversity characteristics.

This study examines whether female directorship on board is related to firm's risk-taking behavior in India.

The study considers the top 500 listed companies in India during the period 2013 to 2018 for the analysis. The paper employs fixed effects as well as a dynamic panel data model to address the bias in the fixed effects model when the lagged risk outcome is included as an explanatory variable.

The study finds that the presence of female directors on board is unrelated to the firm's risk-outcomes and the risk-adjusted return earned by the shareholders. The results are in line with the tokenism theory of board diversity. Having a higher share of female independent directors is also unrelated to the risk-taking behavior of firms. The findings are in contrast to the critical mass theory and the agency theory of gender diversity. The study does not rule out the possibility of female directors' risk-preferences being similar to those of male directors.

The findings suggest that regulations related to having independent female directors may not add value for the shareholders in the short run. The business case for such stringent regulations in India on the gender diversity of boards remains unclear.

This is the first study to analyze the relationship between gender diversity of boards and firm-level risk in India. Most of the studies have focused on gender diversity and firm performance in India. However, modern portfolio theory suggests that both risk and return are important as shareholders care about risk-adjusted returns.