[chasely]

> we have one at my local university that says all PhD defense committees must include one woman.

Wow, that would be really hard to do in some engineering disciplines where I am, and also make the women in those departments take on unnecessary committee obligations compared to their male colleagues.

I recognize discriminatory hiring practices play a large role in M:F ratios in academic departments, but I do get tired of diversity being distilled into what you can tell about someone from a picture rather than their life experiences. My committee is all white guys, but their backgrounds are very different and all but one have had very unlikely paths to academia compared to someone growing up in the US.