Editorial: Barnstable and the appearance of Token Women in the year 2025

Summarizing local meetings has meant viewing local meetings, even with AI's support.

Watching meeting after meeting, especially our regulatory boards that have real authority - the Board of Health, the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Conservation Commission, the Board of Assessors - has put a bright light on their maleness.

Flip through meeting summary images. The bench is full of men.

It looks like the Rotary Club. In 1972.

But these are citizen boards. In 2025.

Appointed boards, that is. The people do not load men onto our elected bodies.

The images promoted us to ask AI what "Token Women" means.

"A "token woman" refers to a woman who is included in a group—often in a workplace, leadership team, or decision-making body—primarily to give the appearance of diversity and inclusion, rather than as a genuine effort to promote gender equality. This term is often used critically, implying that the woman is there to fulfill a quota rather than being valued for her skills, expertise, or contributions."

Listening to local meetings does not suggest the light sprinkling of women on our regulatory boards has anything to do with symbolic inclusion. These are smart, capable people.

But it's 2025, and time to move on from even the appearance of tokenism.

It's hard to think about young women in Barnstable having to look hard to find someone who looks like them in decision-making roles on our regulatory boards. If they watched meetings over time, they'd see some of the same men on multiple regulatory boards, some who have moved from board to board, and some who have served for an extraordinarily long time. (They'd also see men in nearly all senior management positions, but that's another story.)

This is not a call for quotas or for the appointment of less qualified women over more qualified men. Those sorts of things are wrong and offend men and women in equal measure.

This is a call to step forward and volunteer to serve on a local board or committee, and to help broaden the net by reaching out to friends and neighbors and urge capable caring people of all sorts to apply.

Keep an eye on the board and committee openings list and apply. But express interest in any board or commission, even those without announced vacancies. Sometimes, it seems, people who have held seats forever - and who serve on multiple boards - roll into new term after new term without discussion of other interested and qualified citizens. More volunteers might help to take the auto out of what can look like an automatic reappointment system.

Prior expertise is not a prerequisite: all these guys learned how to be on these committees while on the job.