9 ms·

Boeing communications boss resigns over sexist article he wrote in 1987

24 points by andness 6y ago

jtbayly 6y ago
Cancel culture strikes again.
whatshisface 6y ago
From the boss's article: > They may become inhibited and stilted, self-consciously muting the more overt expressions of their comraderie because they feel that frank vulgarity is inappropriate in the presence of females, even if that vulgarity is a male social lubricant and if women profess not to object. They may openly rebuff her presence because they are unable to relate to her on masculine emotional terms. They may treat her with patronizing tolerance, as the unit's mascot. They may being to compete with each other for her attention, breaking up group loyalties and shared destiny for individual sexual or romantic gratification. Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point out exist today. To balance out your opinion of how right he was, he also said this: >In contrast, women do not naturally band together ritual comradeship. Clearly, he didn't provide any sources or reason to believe that. His article was armchair speculation. Repeating cultural beliefs without support, as if they were scientific facts, served as the mainstay of "polite" racism and sexism for decades, and although polite society has moved on from those cultural beliefs, it's a lesson to all of us that the practice of writing these unscientific articles never went out of fashion.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  How could that statement balance my opinion of how right he was? If the only problem with it is that he didn't provide any sources or reasons to believe that, it is worth pointing out that you have neither provided sources or reasons to believe the opposite.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    If you have some unsubstantiated armchair opinions about something, the right thing to do isn't to publish them and wait for someone to correct you, it's to remain silent until you find a reason for you opinion, or change your opinion. Otherwise, we would drown in a sea of well-written articles that say "X is true" and "X is false" with equal frequency, and no matter how many we read we would never learn anything.
    - cbhl 6y ago
      In mathematics, an unsubstantiated armchair opinion is called a "conjecture", and can be subsequently proven or disproven by the same person or another person. If scientists of yore had "remain silent until you find a reason for your opinion" we'd probably still think the sun revolves around the earth.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        Mathematicians clearly label their conjectures, but this was phrased as a statement. Surely you are not suggesting that mathematicians go around publishing their guesses with language indistinguishable from their knowledge. Strictly speaking, as you suggest, it wouldn't be wrong to write, "I thought about it, and although I don't have any reason to believe it, the notion that women don't form groups for the sake of comradeship settled in to my mind, and with a gust of wind, floated from there to this paper." However nobody would ever write that! Passing off guesses as knowledge only works as a career if you try to dress up your guesses as knowledge, for example by phrasing them in a way that makes it sound like they're already commonly known.
        jtbayly 6y ago
        > Passing off guesses as knowledge only works as a career if you try to dress up your guesses as knowledge... What he wrote was essentially common knowledge at the time, not a novel theory that needed defending. That’s why elsewhere in this thread it is pointed out that you can’t judge it by today’s standards. We have different common knowledge today that people use as justifications for their opinions without feeling any need to cite a paper. Some of that knowledge is right and some wrong. For a modern example, you could take a look at a comment that says his conclusions were wrong without citing any evidence.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point out exist today. ISTM that he's predicting some very real social frictions, but that calling them "consequences of sexism" may be a bit silly-- unless you posit that literally any institutional dynamic that might disadvantage women in some way is per se structural/institutional sexism, which is really just a matter of semantics. They're consequences of forcing people presenting with very different gender roles (male vs. female) to interact in a newly diverse environment. This will always involve some compromising of values.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    The absolute last debate I want to get in to is what the definition of sexism is, so I'll just say that I meant it as "anything that's bad, psychological or sociological in nature, and related to gender."
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    "Gender roles" seems obviously institutional. Who exactly assigns them, and why would it be silly to say that the portions that aren't clearly biological are likely sexist?
    - jtbayly 6y ago
      Are you saying it’s not clearly biological for men to behave differently around women? That it’s not clearly biological for a man to place a high priority on seeking a woman for “individual sexual or romantic gratification” in a way that can cause him to view other men as competitors at the expense of “group loyalties and shared destiny”?
hawkice 6y ago
He claims this is why, but if you're the chief spokesperson for a company that can't get past a safety and reliability scandal, I think it's just he was asked to resign.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  He's only been there 6 months. Seems unlikely.
major505 6y ago
this cancel culture thing is getting out of control. First you cannot judge how people would talk or act in the past based in present values. Why are people able to consider cultural subjectivity when talking about other cultures, but not our own? We are not the same society that we where 40 years ago. Things changed, opnions to And event if the guy was sexist, this attitute dosent consider if his opnion changed over the years. People learn new things, get new experiences that change theirs perspectives. Letting go a worker because of a opnion he held 35 years ago should be met with a lawsuit.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  He was canceled by Boeing. If they thought he was worth keeping, it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article, especially since his classy exit shows him to be willing to contritely say the right things now. If you're saying that Boeing is out of control, I agree, although firing some exec for being passionately sexist at one time in his life doesn't rank on the list of their sins imo.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article Would it? Or would anyone who tried to defend him also have their own 30+ years ago opinions dredged up? It's not safe for anyone until there is "herd immunity" against being cancelled and we're a long way from there yet.
olivermarks 6y ago
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
wegs 6y ago
Core to any sort of social progress is the belief that people can change, and people changing. I sure as heck wouldn't want anyone judged for views they held 30 years ago. I don't want to be judged for the views I hold today in 30 years either. That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now. I'm a different person now than I was in college, and I'll be a different person in another 30 years. I may be a better person or a worse person -- I don't know yet -- but I definitely will not the same person I am today. I can think of few things a person might have done in 1987 which ought to affect their lives now. This does not reflect well upon Boeing at all. There is also an element of ageism here. Virtually anyone beyond some age will have held currently-unacceptable views at some point in their lives.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  The problem is there isn't a culturally agreeable calculus to know when someone is trustworthy, and that the "punishment" here is one of withdrawing from relations through the free exercise of association. The main intervention you can do is to tell people to stop exercising their freedom of association. > That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now. If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender" follow them as they attempt to regain their life as a youth educator? Should they never ever be allowed near children again? If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual inferiority, should they be entrusted with a leadership position over black Americans?
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Pragmatically, the trust we should give to a former criminal should scale with where we think their crime lies on the "innate" to "acute" spectrum. For example, teenage joyriding is something we can expect people to get over, so you would probably feel okay letting a 50-year-old with that (and nothing else) on their record valet your car. I would suggest that ideas are some of the easiest things to change.
  - 6y ago
asveikau 6y ago
Maybe he was asked to quit, perhaps rather forcefully. But he is going out in a classy way by saying his prior position was wrong. The people on this thread calling this "cancel culture" could learn something from the frankness of the statement. Keep in mind his company has military contracts. If the PR guy is on record opposing women in the military, even a long time ago... Not good.
- apsec112 6y ago
  This culture of "never forget, no excuses, no forgiveness" is part of why the US has so many people in prison. Suppose someone commits an armed robbery. They should be arrested, certainly, for many reasons. But after they have been tried, punished, and served their sentence, should they be permanently exiled from society? Should they never be able to find employment for the rest of their life? No, because that doesn't help anyone and just creates more crime. This person is probably rich enough to retire, but most people are not - they need a job, or else they'll get evicted and wind up homeless. "You can never work again" isn't that much better than America's history of insanely vindictive prison sentences.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I totally believe in forgiveness. But I think you miss the point. This guy's entire job was promote the public image when, among other things, selling to the military. And he wasn't rank and file. He was near the top. He won't have trouble finding a job that doesn't involve giving a bad image to a military contractor.
    - apsec112 6y ago
      He wasn't re-assigned, transferred, or demoted, even though Boeing is a big company with plenty of positions - he was fired. And many people are willing to fire even blue-collar workers and random small business managers: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
Kednicma 6y ago
I see people complaining that he was canceled, but if it takes three and a half decades to get canceled, then I'm not sure I see the problem. If I were to write an article about how I think that women ought not to serve in the military, or any such similar drivel, then I would probably perish naturally before any punishment arrived. Are folks here anticipating that they themselves will get canceled for their old sexist writings, or is there something else here?
- apsec112 6y ago
  This sort of retroactive vindictiveness is bad for everyone. In 1987, almost no one supported gay marriage, and many people wrote articles saying so. (DOMA was enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton.) A lot of people, perhaps a majority of Americans, have changed their minds in the light of new arguments and evidence. How willing will anyone be to change their minds, if the response is "that doesn't matter, you're fired and exiled from polite society for the rest of your life"? "An army officer in the Qin dynasty was supposed to lead his troops somewhere but got delayed. He asked a friend of his "What is the penalty for being late?" "Death." Says his friend. He then asks "What is the penalty for rebellion?" "Death." Says his friend. He replies "Well then..." And thus began the Dazexiang Uprising."
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    Well, this executive voluntarily resigned. He could have just as easily issued a statement condemning his younger self for their sexist and puerile remarks, disavowing his older views and committing himself to doing better. Plenty of folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and improving as people. There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]. (He also opposed DOMA [1].) Indeed, a majority of Americans, some 70%, have had to change their minds about this, but that does not mean that there were not folks back then who had reasonable moral stances about ensuring that all of us have the right to volunteer to go die for this country. I'm not seeing what's actually bad here. Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what you say. [0] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-rights https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-right... [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-soldiers https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-sold...
hindsightbias 6y ago
If a United States Naval Officer goes to the trouble to get his passionate views into the annals of the USNI, you better go to the trouble to retract them if you’ve evolved. This wasn’t some tweet. And context matters in retrospect given what happened in the Tailhook era.
- apsec112 6y ago
  The article says he apologized: "Golightly stepped down Thursday as Boeing’s senior vice president of communications following an employee complaint about the 1987 article, which he called “embarrassingly wrong and offensive.”"
  - hindsightbias 6y ago
    A former Naval Officer and C-Level aplogizing when he gets caught 30 years later is not honorable. The time to do it was decades ago. It’s a wonder who vetted him. He’s not some kid on the internet.
    - apsec112 6y ago
      The guy is in his 60s. Asking people to remember everything they have ever written over their entire life, and then publicly retract it as soon as they change their minds about any given portion, is not reasonable. Heck, I had an article published in a student newspaper twelve years ago (in 2008), and even now I barely remember what it says.

24 points by andness 6y ago

Cancel culture strikes again.

From the boss's article: > They may become inhibited and stilted, self-consciously muting the more overt expressions of their comraderie because they feel that frank vulgarity is inappropriate in the presence of females, even if that vulgarity is a male social lubricant and if women profess not to object. They may openly rebuff her presence because they are unable to relate to her on masculine emotional terms. They may treat her with patronizing tolerance, as the unit's mascot. They may being to compete with each other for her attention, breaking up group loyalties and shared destiny for individual sexual or romantic gratification. Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point out exist today. To balance out your opinion of how right he was, he also said this: >In contrast, women do not naturally band together ritual comradeship. Clearly, he didn't provide any sources or reason to believe that. His article was armchair speculation. Repeating cultural beliefs without support, as if they were scientific facts, served as the mainstay of "polite" racism and sexism for decades, and although polite society has moved on from those cultural beliefs, it's a lesson to all of us that the practice of writing these unscientific articles never went out of fashion.

jtbayly 6y ago
How could that statement balance my opinion of how right he was? If the only problem with it is that he didn't provide any sources or reasons to believe that, it is worth pointing out that you have neither provided sources or reasons to believe the opposite.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  If you have some unsubstantiated armchair opinions about something, the right thing to do isn't to publish them and wait for someone to correct you, it's to remain silent until you find a reason for you opinion, or change your opinion. Otherwise, we would drown in a sea of well-written articles that say "X is true" and "X is false" with equal frequency, and no matter how many we read we would never learn anything.
  - cbhl 6y ago
    In mathematics, an unsubstantiated armchair opinion is called a "conjecture", and can be subsequently proven or disproven by the same person or another person. If scientists of yore had "remain silent until you find a reason for your opinion" we'd probably still think the sun revolves around the earth.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      Mathematicians clearly label their conjectures, but this was phrased as a statement. Surely you are not suggesting that mathematicians go around publishing their guesses with language indistinguishable from their knowledge. Strictly speaking, as you suggest, it wouldn't be wrong to write, "I thought about it, and although I don't have any reason to believe it, the notion that women don't form groups for the sake of comradeship settled in to my mind, and with a gust of wind, floated from there to this paper." However nobody would ever write that! Passing off guesses as knowledge only works as a career if you try to dress up your guesses as knowledge, for example by phrasing them in a way that makes it sound like they're already commonly known.
      - jtbayly 6y ago
        > Passing off guesses as knowledge only works as a career if you try to dress up your guesses as knowledge... What he wrote was essentially common knowledge at the time, not a novel theory that needed defending. That’s why elsewhere in this thread it is pointed out that you can’t judge it by today’s standards. We have different common knowledge today that people use as justifications for their opinions without feeling any need to cite a paper. Some of that knowledge is right and some wrong. For a modern example, you could take a look at a comment that says his conclusions were wrong without citing any evidence.
zozbot234 6y ago
> Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point out exist today. ISTM that he's predicting some very real social frictions, but that calling them "consequences of sexism" may be a bit silly-- unless you posit that literally any institutional dynamic that might disadvantage women in some way is per se structural/institutional sexism, which is really just a matter of semantics. They're consequences of forcing people presenting with very different gender roles (male vs. female) to interact in a newly diverse environment. This will always involve some compromising of values.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  The absolute last debate I want to get in to is what the definition of sexism is, so I'll just say that I meant it as "anything that's bad, psychological or sociological in nature, and related to gender."
- pessimizer 6y ago
  "Gender roles" seems obviously institutional. Who exactly assigns them, and why would it be silly to say that the portions that aren't clearly biological are likely sexist?
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    Are you saying it’s not clearly biological for men to behave differently around women? That it’s not clearly biological for a man to place a high priority on seeking a woman for “individual sexual or romantic gratification” in a way that can cause him to view other men as competitors at the expense of “group loyalties and shared destiny”?

hawkice 6y ago

He claims this is why, but if you're the chief spokesperson for a company that can't get past a safety and reliability scandal, I think it's just he was asked to resign.

jtbayly 6y ago
He's only been there 6 months. Seems unlikely.

major505 6y ago

this cancel culture thing is getting out of control. First you cannot judge how people would talk or act in the past based in present values. Why are people able to consider cultural subjectivity when talking about other cultures, but not our own? We are not the same society that we where 40 years ago. Things changed, opnions to And event if the guy was sexist, this attitute dosent consider if his opnion changed over the years. People learn new things, get new experiences that change theirs perspectives. Letting go a worker because of a opnion he held 35 years ago should be met with a lawsuit.

pessimizer 6y ago
He was canceled by Boeing. If they thought he was worth keeping, it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article, especially since his classy exit shows him to be willing to contritely say the right things now. If you're saying that Boeing is out of control, I agree, although firing some exec for being passionately sexist at one time in his life doesn't rank on the list of their sins imo.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article Would it? Or would anyone who tried to defend him also have their own 30+ years ago opinions dredged up? It's not safe for anyone until there is "herd immunity" against being cancelled and we're a long way from there yet.

olivermarks 6y ago

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

wegs 6y ago

Core to any sort of social progress is the belief that people can change, and people changing. I sure as heck wouldn't want anyone judged for views they held 30 years ago. I don't want to be judged for the views I hold today in 30 years either. That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now. I'm a different person now than I was in college, and I'll be a different person in another 30 years. I may be a better person or a worse person -- I don't know yet -- but I definitely will not the same person I am today. I can think of few things a person might have done in 1987 which ought to affect their lives now. This does not reflect well upon Boeing at all. There is also an element of ageism here. Virtually anyone beyond some age will have held currently-unacceptable views at some point in their lives.

threatofrain 6y ago
The problem is there isn't a culturally agreeable calculus to know when someone is trustworthy, and that the "punishment" here is one of withdrawing from relations through the free exercise of association. The main intervention you can do is to tell people to stop exercising their freedom of association. > That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now. If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender" follow them as they attempt to regain their life as a youth educator? Should they never ever be allowed near children again? If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual inferiority, should they be entrusted with a leadership position over black Americans?
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Pragmatically, the trust we should give to a former criminal should scale with where we think their crime lies on the "innate" to "acute" spectrum. For example, teenage joyriding is something we can expect people to get over, so you would probably feel okay letting a 50-year-old with that (and nothing else) on their record valet your car. I would suggest that ideas are some of the easiest things to change.
- 6y ago

asveikau 6y ago

Maybe he was asked to quit, perhaps rather forcefully. But he is going out in a classy way by saying his prior position was wrong. The people on this thread calling this "cancel culture" could learn something from the frankness of the statement. Keep in mind his company has military contracts. If the PR guy is on record opposing women in the military, even a long time ago... Not good.

apsec112 6y ago
This culture of "never forget, no excuses, no forgiveness" is part of why the US has so many people in prison. Suppose someone commits an armed robbery. They should be arrested, certainly, for many reasons. But after they have been tried, punished, and served their sentence, should they be permanently exiled from society? Should they never be able to find employment for the rest of their life? No, because that doesn't help anyone and just creates more crime. This person is probably rich enough to retire, but most people are not - they need a job, or else they'll get evicted and wind up homeless. "You can never work again" isn't that much better than America's history of insanely vindictive prison sentences.
- asveikau 6y ago
  I totally believe in forgiveness. But I think you miss the point. This guy's entire job was promote the public image when, among other things, selling to the military. And he wasn't rank and file. He was near the top. He won't have trouble finding a job that doesn't involve giving a bad image to a military contractor.
  - apsec112 6y ago
    He wasn't re-assigned, transferred, or demoted, even though Boeing is a big company with plenty of positions - he was fired. And many people are willing to fire even blue-collar workers and random small business managers: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

Kednicma 6y ago

I see people complaining that he was canceled, but if it takes three and a half decades to get canceled, then I'm not sure I see the problem. If I were to write an article about how I think that women ought not to serve in the military, or any such similar drivel, then I would probably perish naturally before any punishment arrived. Are folks here anticipating that they themselves will get canceled for their old sexist writings, or is there something else here?

apsec112 6y ago
This sort of retroactive vindictiveness is bad for everyone. In 1987, almost no one supported gay marriage, and many people wrote articles saying so. (DOMA was enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton.) A lot of people, perhaps a majority of Americans, have changed their minds in the light of new arguments and evidence. How willing will anyone be to change their minds, if the response is "that doesn't matter, you're fired and exiled from polite society for the rest of your life"? "An army officer in the Qin dynasty was supposed to lead his troops somewhere but got delayed. He asked a friend of his "What is the penalty for being late?" "Death." Says his friend. He then asks "What is the penalty for rebellion?" "Death." Says his friend. He replies "Well then..." And thus began the Dazexiang Uprising."
- Kednicma 6y ago
  Well, this executive voluntarily resigned. He could have just as easily issued a statement condemning his younger self for their sexist and puerile remarks, disavowing his older views and committing himself to doing better. Plenty of folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and improving as people. There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]. (He also opposed DOMA [1].) Indeed, a majority of Americans, some 70%, have had to change their minds about this, but that does not mean that there were not folks back then who had reasonable moral stances about ensuring that all of us have the right to volunteer to go die for this country. I'm not seeing what's actually bad here. Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what you say. [0] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-rights https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-right... [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-soldiers https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-sold...

hindsightbias 6y ago

If a United States Naval Officer goes to the trouble to get his passionate views into the annals of the USNI, you better go to the trouble to retract them if you’ve evolved. This wasn’t some tweet. And context matters in retrospect given what happened in the Tailhook era.

apsec112 6y ago
The article says he apologized: "Golightly stepped down Thursday as Boeing’s senior vice president of communications following an employee complaint about the 1987 article, which he called “embarrassingly wrong and offensive.”"
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  A former Naval Officer and C-Level aplogizing when he gets caught 30 years later is not honorable. The time to do it was decades ago. It’s a wonder who vetted him. He’s not some kid on the internet.
  - apsec112 6y ago
    The guy is in his 60s. Asking people to remember everything they have ever written over their entire life, and then publicly retract it as soon as they change their minds about any given portion, is not reasonable. Heck, I had an article published in a student newspaper twelve years ago (in 2008), and even now I barely remember what it says.