A RANDOM EVENT? I could not find in the journalism that I looked at the key fact in trying to assess what happened: What percentage of the players in the tournament were women? (I looked at a list of competitors, but I couldn’t be sure of whether names were masculine or feminine.) If 10% of the players were women (which seems high), then having 7 women opponents out of 10 seems unusual. This binomial calculator, if I used it correctly) gives a probability of 0.000009121599999439844 of getting 7 women opponents or more out of 10 pairings if the probability of getting a woman opponent on a single draw is 10%.
However, there are black swans and there were a number of women competitors other than Hou Yifan, and one can imagine comment if any one of the other women had 7 women opponents out of 10.
If you listen to the commentators, there was a final game for important money being played that day between a wife and her husband. Low probability events do occur.