Back when Sarbanes Oxley was fresh, some people argued that the stepped-up board responsibilities would lead to more females on corporate boards.

The idea was that the need for talent, financial talent especially, was so great that boards would be prodded to expand the traditional pool of candidates. It didn't quite work out that way. Sarbox turned out to be something of a non-event in the march of gender rights in the boardroom. And that has Anne Mulcahy, former CEO and chairman of Xerox, worked up a bit.

"Boards without women--blacklist those suckers. It's 2011. They've had the time--it's significant that they don't have women," she told an audience at a conference recently.

It's a bad sign if boards aren't looking for women, she says. To be sure, most boards have at least one woman. Only 10 percent of the S&P 500 companies are men-only, down from 14 percent in 2000. That said, women are still underrepresented on boards, accounting for between 15 to 20 percent of all corporate directors.

So would it hurt or help for female candidates to say no to women-less boards? It may be that the job, in these days of regulatory angst, is hard enough without having to be a gender pioneer. The real question may in fact be whether anyone would want to be a director at all, especially one on an audit committee. 

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