Read gender&diversity 1: On tokenism

TOKENISM: A pattern in an organization where there is a single individual or a small minority in the midst of a majority.

Lets use an example: a woman in a men dominated firm.

The first pattern: in the spotlight. A token is highly visible, everyone knows what she does. She has little privacy. Anyone else can disappear into the anonymity of the group but the token cannot. This places pressure on the way she functions. Partly because the token is held responsible for the future of the other members of her group: if she does badly she will spoil things for the other women(or blacks/people with a handicap etc).

According to the token theory, there are three ways for an individual to react to the spotlight pattern:

• becoming a super type of the majority ('Mrs Thatcher', 'one of the boys').
• becoming invisible (frozen rabbit: let nobody see me).
• a radical stance: by being pinned down in your exceptional position, you manifest yourself as being more radical than you would normally be with your own group of like-minded people.

A second pattern: the presence of a token causes the majority to react more as a group, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The difference between the members of the majority group seem to be reduced by language use, jokes, codes, common experiences. For instance: men start to behave in a more 'male' fashion if for the first time a woman joins their department. This makes it extremely difficult for 'the token': this first woman, to join in, with the likely result that she becomes isolated. The individual is then faced with the difficult choice between adapting and joining in or being excluded.

Being aware of those patterns can make it easier for management and tokens to understand what is happening and prevent those patterns. The best prevention is to ensure that a minority is never so small that tokenism is inevitable.