..but you don't find it strange that merit somehow only ended up in one gender over the last several hundreds of years? Especially given that there seem to have existed competent women in this time, but for some reason men chose to elect only men into high positions, to the point of preventing women from applying or getting such jobs. Then suddenly we all collectively decided that from now on, only merit is measured, but we pipe up when a woman gets elected to say that "did these people really check merit?"
It feels a bit too close to "lets only choose people like we did the last hundreds of years" when noone batted an eye if some man got chosen. If you didn't comment "but did they really check this mans credentials and merits" every time MI6 gets a new boss, then it feels a bit odd to do it only now, don't you think?