Criticism became louder earlier this year after prominent office holders like then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis left the administration. Slots at the departments of State, Defense and the Treasury that many liberals had hoped would go to female candidates ended up being filled by men.

Image Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (top left) and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (top right) have left the administration. Samantha Power (bottom left) was nominated as ambassador to the United Nations and Susan E. Rice (bottom right) as national security adviser. Credit... Clockwise from top left: Matt Rourke/Associated Press, Carlos Osorio/Associated Press, Alex Brandon/Associated Press, Emmanuel Dunan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Obama himself responded to the criticism. “I would just suggest that everybody kind of wait until they’ve seen all my appointments, who is in the White House staff and who is in my cabinet, before they rush to judgment,” he said at a news conference in January as he was starting his second term. “Until you’ve seen what my overall team looks like, it’s premature to assume that somehow we’re going backwards. We’re not going backwards, we’re going forward.”

Since those remarks, he has named a series of women to top posts, including for interior secretary, commerce secretary, budget director and director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But speaking privately, some administration officials have said that imbalance has resonated within the building and caused the White House to put a priority on considering female candidates earlier this year.

As of June 2012, 43 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointees had been women, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data. That is about the same proportion as in the Clinton administration, and up from the roughly one-third appointed by George W. Bush.

The largest gains in the number of women in the executive branch occurred in the Clinton administration. In no administration before his did women hold more than 18 percent of cabinet-level jobs; in his second term, the share exceeded 40 percent. At that level, women held a substantially larger share of senior roles in the executive branch than they did in Congress or in corporate America. During Mr. Clinton’s presidency, no more than nine women were ever serving in the Senate, whereas 20 do today.

The share of women holding board seats on Fortune 500 companies has also risen over the last two decades, to 16.6 percent last year from 9.6 percent in 1995, according to Catalyst. The executive branch continues to have a larger share of women in senior roles than Congress or corporate America, but it has also changed less since the 1990s.