Professor H, the department chair, was a good guy who usually did the right thing.
D applied for a job at Ohio State, after having had a couple of postdoc positions. The consensus was that her file wasn't good enough for an offer at the assistant professor level, but it was a strong file for a postdoc position.
Professor H refused to consider D for a postdoc. "But she's a top candidate," I said, and H agreed.
Why didn't she get the job?
Professor H said that if D were male, he'd be happy to hire her for a postdoc position. But she was female. H said that the higher administration might accuse us of gender discrimination if we offered D only a postdoc, when she was so many years past the PhD. It didn't matter to him that we had made offers to men with similar files to hers, including about the same number of postdoc years.
I find it ironic that the fear of a gender discrimination accusation was the reason D was denied a position that she would have gotten had she been male.