Svetlana Jitomirskaya's letter [1] supporting Prof. Thompson is a worthwhile read. From that letter:<p>> <i>"I think that the often present push to increase percentage of women beyond what is currently reasonably warranted by merit, only multiplies the biases, is very damaging for the community’s perception of women as a group, and thus is very harmful for the climate. As one example, I was recently on a committee to select the winner of an important prize. It went to a female mathematician. I am sure that most people who don't closely know her or her work, when learning the news, thought “of course, they wanted to select a woman”. Yet her gender had zero influence on our considerations, there was no push on the committee, and she was selected from all the applications purely on scientific merit according to the prize criteria. The value of this well-deserved prize is not at all the same for her as it would have been if she was a man."</i><p>[1]: Pages 21-22 of <a href="https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf</a>