I was recently a judge for a competition for women in tech, aimed at highlighting female founders. There was one criteria that really stuck with me; entrants had to list the startup’s founding team – and vast majority had one woman.

I suppose I should have been less surprised. After all, in Europe only 14% of investment goes to female-led startups, so ditching a stable job in favour of starting a business is a much riskier prospect for women.

Looking at all those heavily male startup boards, I couldn’t help asking myself whether they were really female-led. And also, how many of those men started a company with their mates, realised they needed a woman for a bit of diversity and are now rolling her out at any opportunity to prove how socially aware they are?

This “token woman” problem doesn’t just happen on boards – it’s seen every day at tech industry events, with organisers desperate to avoid all male panels.

The problem is that once a woman has appeared on a couple of panels, or been quoted in the media a few times, she then becomes a go-to for anyone looking for a “woman in tech” for their event.

One female developer told me she now spent so much time sitting on panels, commenting to the press or being wheeled out at recruitment drives that she wasn’t actually doing the job she’d been hired for.

We need these female role models to encourage young girls into technology. However, when these women are the only ones on an all male team, when they are promoted as the face of a company but in reality are the exception not the rule, we are downgrading them to little more than figureheads. This not only diminishes the women and the companies they work for but also leads to accusations of tokenism – and no woman wants that said about her.

Women in tech have been handed a double-edged sword. They’re given the opportunity to promote themselves but at the price of potentially hearing the “only there because she’s a woman” comments as they walk down the corridors.

So should we stop asking them to be on panels, just shrug our shoulders and accept that tech is a male-dominated industry? No.

To get more women into tech we need to keep highlighting the brilliant ones. But journalists, researchers and events organisers should make sure they don’t keep going back to the same women time after time. It’s too much to ask of them and doesn’t highlight the breadth of talent in the industry.

We also need to encourage men in tech to listen and talk to young women who might want to enter the industry. Encouraging men to sit on women-focused panels at tech events is one of the easiest ways to encourage better gender relations in the industry.

As much as the tech industry can seem like a bro-fest I don’t think the majority of men working in it want to exclude women; they’re just not aware of the issues or how to fix them. By getting more men to women in tech events, they get to hear first-hand about the experiences of those women, and the women get to increase their networks. This hopefully then also leads to more women being hired into the industry at all levels, increasing the talent pool and minimising the figurehead problem.

Finally we need to let the idea of tokenism go. It’s possible that some women have been given a job because a company wanted a bit of diversity, but I think we all know some men who have been given a job simply because they looked like the rest of the team. So the next time you suggest a woman has been given a job because of her gender it’s worth taking a look at all the men in your office and wondering which of them fits in the same category.

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