A small group of faculty, staff, and visiting faculty was having lunch in the dining hall of a Harvard dorm one day in 1990, while I was visiting Harvard.
To convince us that Harvard treated its Afro-American Studies department very poorly, someone exclaimed "Harvard even chose a white woman as interim chair." She emphasized both "white" and "woman", with greater stress on "woman", to make the point that both were problematic.
Without thinking, I blurted out, "What's wrong with choosing a woman?"
The senior staff person who had spoken was herself a white woman. She was surprised by the question, and she stumbled as she tried to explain how choosing a white woman undermined the department and showed Harvard's disdain for it, since clearly they should have chosen a black man. She seemed reluctant to back down, but I think she eventually wondered whether she was on shaky ground.
Whenever someone shows that they (subconsciously or otherwise) believe that putting a woman in a job devalues that job, I'm disappointed. (I'll leave to those who've thought more deeply about it than I have the question of whether choosing someone white to head Harvard's Afro-Am department undermined that department.)
More than a decade later I was asked if I'd be interested in a professorship at a place I'll call Cheshire Cat University. During my interview, female CCU grad students told me about a history of problems with the treatment of women, and how the math department had tried to address it.
At my interview with the Dean I mentioned this, and asked about the situation for women. He had heard nothing about the problems in the math department. But he told me he had set up a committee to deal with women, and made Professor Lion the committee's chair. The Dean said he thought it was smart to appoint many men to the committee and a distinguished man as committee chair, since that gave the committee more credibility.
I knew that Lion knew much less than I did about gender discrimination in academia and what to do about it. The Dean gave me the impression that I wouldn't be chosen to lead such committees, and would be passed over in favor of less knowledgeable men, whose maleness would give a "committee about women" more credibility. When the Dean spoke about Lion as if he were higher than me in the academic hierarchy, I realized that the Dean didn't have a clue that I was being hired as senior faculty and Lion's rank was no higher than mine.
The Dean wasn't the only one at Cheshire Cat who seemed clueless. A bulletin board in a hallway had names and photos of all the mathematics graduate students. I counted that more than 3/4 of the grad students were male. But when I met with the department head, he very confidently told me that the grad student gender ratio was 50-50.
The grad students took me on a lovely hike, where I heard more stories from the unhappy female students.
When I returned to the bulletin board to confirm my computation of the gender ratio, I overheard Professor Lion in his office telling someone what a great time I had on the hike, and how impressed I was with how happy the female students were. I don't know where he got that from. Certainly not me.