Why Women Need Solidarity: Tokenism Harms Us All

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Critical mass, the generally accepted theory regarding women on boards and executive management, says that when women occupy more than 30 percent of the positions in a specific group, positive social change within the organization starts to happen.

That is, when you have a certain number of women in elite circles of leadership, the theory suggests that firms will have better representation of women at senior levels. The firm will put more effort into recruiting and retaining women, leadership styles will improve as more diverse models emerge, discussions will become more inclusive and dynamic, attitudes about who’s suited for which jobs will change, and the company will perhaps devote more resources to the types of programs that level the playing field for women.

But there’s an uncomfortable gray area between having no women in a group of leaders and having three or more women in that group, and that area is tokenism.

Tokenism isn’t just bad because it implies that token women don’t really “deserve” their spot. In fact, token women are by and large accomplished and deserving of their role, and they probably fought tooth and nail against negative stereotypes to get it, only to have people (both men and women) in their firm consider them undeserving of their title.

In fact, tokenism also harms all women. When leadership groups are still at the tokenism stage of diversity, token individuals are set up to compete mainly with one another, and they are likely see other token individuals as a threat to their own power.

A new working paper out of Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business indicates that tokenism is alive and well at today’s top companies. The research shows that tokenism is actually keeping women out of top jobs. The longitudinal study of companies in the S&P 1,500 shows that when organizations find themselves with a female CEO, they are less likely to have women in other top jobs, especially line positions. Similarly, when a woman is in one category (line versus staff) of senior management positions, it is less likely that there are other women in senior management positions in that category.

As the percentage of women in senior management roles at top companies is increasing at a glacial pace (for example, in 2012, only 14.3 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO, a marginal increase since 2009 when it was 13.5 percent), now may be a critical time to examine why. Is tokenism keeping more women out of top jobs? What role are other women playing here? It’s not a pretty picture.

Why Solidarity is the Answer

The study indicates that token women may be actively working to keep other women out. The authors acknowledge that recent research shows that the “queen bee” syndrome may be a thing of the past – for example, women are more likely to sponsor other women than men according to Catalyst research, and other studies have shown that in firms with women CEOs, the wage gap is smaller. But when it comes to coveted positions in senior management, the structure of tokenism may be turning women against one another.

According to the authors, Cristian L. Dezső, University of Maryland; David Gaddis Ross, Columbia Business School; and Jose Uribe, Columbia Business School, having a woman on a firm’s top management team makes it less likely that there will be another woman on that team.

This reality was predicted by Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s groundbreaking research into tokenism in the ’70s. She observed that men would find ways to pit women against one another when there were only a few women on a team. Dezső, Ross, and Uribe continue, “In general, this perspective suggests that however welcoming men in the majority may be to a single woman on a top management team, they will be significantly less welcoming and perhaps actively hostile to the presence of multiple women on the top management team. These same arguments suggest that organizations would rarely seek to have multiple women on the top management team at the same time.”

Working along with the male resistance factor, a lack of solidarity amongst women at around the same organizational level may be contribute to the reason there are so few women in senior management today.

In fact, the research team analyzed 20 years of financial data on S&P 1,500 firms, and found the greatest negative effect on whether there will be women on a senior management team is the presence of a female CEO. The data suggests that “female CEOs may not generally endeavor to further the interests of other women in their firms, that is, at least with respect to the CEO position…” they write.

They also saw that when there was a female CEO at a company it was less likely that there would be women in line positions, which are generally considered the pipeline to the CEO role (and thus more of a threat to the CEO’s power). Whether on purpose or not, some women CEOs may be endeavoring to keep other women specifically out of striking range.

By and large, it is important to remember that the culprit behind tokenism is not women themselves. An organizational structure given to tokenism encourages top women to compete against one another, because it implies that there is only room at the top for a few people in Category Woman (rather than simply promoting people because they are the best for the job regardless of their gender).

That’s why actively nurturing solidarity amongst women is so important. We need to acknowledge that the sinister forces of tokenism strive to keep women from achieving equality. We’d all – women and men, companies, society as a whole – benefit by enabling real equality, rather than patting ourselves on the back when one woman is elected CEO of a company and yet all of her direct reports are male, or when a senior management team has a woman leading only one function.

To the extent that gender diversity is a benefit to corporate leadership (and plenty of research shows it is), tokenism hurts companies as well.