Welcome to Gender Letter — a weekly take on news, trends and culture by The Times’s gender editor, Jessica Bennett. Want future installments delivered to your inbox? Sign up here. Tell us what you think at nytgender@nytimes.com.

Dear readers,

“There aren’t that many women with the right credentials.”

“All the ‘good’ women have already been snapped up.”

“We have one woman already on the board.”

It may be hard to believe in 2018, but those were among the excuses British corporate bosses recently gave to explain the lack of women in senior positions at their companies, as my colleague Amie Tsang recently reported. They were surfaced as part of an investigation by the British government into why women fill only about a quarter of the country’s corporate-board seats.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, with that attitude, that there are more men called Dave and Steve than there are women heading up the top 100 companies on the London stock exchange (and, yes, more men named John than women who run large companies in the United States).