Maybe it's like the conference speakers. Now that everyone's getting flack if their conference doesn't have female speakers, but there's only a handful of successful female leaders in heavy rotation in the media, they can't go to everything so they inevitably turn stuff down.

As someone purporting to be a scientist I'm surprised you even contributed this anecdote to this discussion.

So, what's the point you're trying to make - that women are offered opportunities but turn them down, and therefore there is no problem?

your biases are showing through. maybe that is the problem.

Why?

Edit: I'm asking because @dnautics gave us an anecdote that doesn't add anything useful. Knowing why would be much more interesting, although still an anecdote.

Because board meetings are, by design, a contentious environment?

I discovered that this is not the case. In general, Board meetings don't work like hollywood says they do. Usually my board meetings are pretty uncontentious.

the plural of anecdote is data.

Probably more like confirmation bias and cherry picking. Pretending you have data on this is laughable.

interesting. Do you think they felt they weren't up to the task?

I did not ask them (two of them are personal friends of mine, so I didn't feel like taking them to task about it).