On Tuesday, Thomas Campbell, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director, announced his resignation. This opening provides the Met’s board an opportunity to consider naming its first female director in the museum’s 147-year history.

Unfortunately, at least one report indicates that the Met’s trustees may already be looking at Daniel Weiss, the current president and chief operating officer, as Mr. Campbell’s replacement. It is surprising that an institution whose innovative curatorial departments have lately acknowledged the diversity of the art canon with exhibitions on Kerry James Marshall, Nasreen Mohamedi and the early modern global textile trade, to name a few, remains so myopic in its hiring at the highest levels of administration.

This oversight, to characterize it charitably, is representative of larger patterns of perhaps unintentional bias that continue to pervade museum culture. A quick sampling of the country’s largest and most visited collections reveals that the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Gallery of Art, among others, have never had female directors, even if some of those museums have had women serve as president or chief financial officers. Sonnet Stanfill, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, recently wrote an Op-Ed in The Times encouraging the V & A and the Tate museums to consider women as candidates for director, speaking to the pervasiveness of this problem in European museums as well.

This bias against female leadership sometimes extends to museums’ efforts to integrate museum education with academic art history. For example, since 1952 the National Gallery of Art in Washington has been the host of the annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, intended to give leading scholars a forum to discuss their research. In 64 years, seven women have been invited to give presentations at this lecture series, and only one of those seven was a woman of color. It is not just female artists who are underrepresented in museums, but female scholars as well, particularly those of color. According to a 2014 study conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors, this has a direct impact on the kinds of artists whose work is exhibited, or more to the point not exhibited.