Joan Toland Bok

Joan Toland Bok is an American energy executive and lawyer who served as the chairwoman of New England Electric System between 1984 and 1998. She was the first woman to lead a large American energy company. She also served as director of the Avery Dennison Corporation.

Bok served on numerous public and nonprofit boards, serving as the president of the Harvard Board of Overseers and as a trustee of the Boston Athenaeum, National Osteoporosis Foundation, Vermont Historical Society, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research. In 1993, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Legal and business career Bok and her husband both began their careers working as lawyers at Ropes & Gray. She worked her way up, She was the first woman to lead a large American energy company. Under Bok's leadership, the company was credited with long delivering its service with low electric rates for consumers while still increasing its stock price. In the 1980s, the company began weaning itself away from investing in nuclear power, which was retrospectively credited as allowing the company to avoid financial losses that other companies incurred in such investments. The company was early in pulling out of the project to construct a second unit at the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant. Bok retired as chairwoman in April 1998.

Bok also served as director of the Avery Dennison Corporation. Bok and her husband took the Massachusetts bar exam, and became the first married couple to pass it at the same time. The Boks are the grandparents of Kenzie Bok, former Boston City Council member and current head of the Boston Housing Authority.

Bok's husband died in 2014.