> So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first of

> So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer Exactly. Patriarchy isn't just a system where all men have power over all women. It's also about hierarchies of men. A good example is the FLDS [1], which Jon Krakauer wrote about in Under the Banner of Heaven. [2] There, the highest-status men are supported by other men who are rewarded with dominance over other lower-down people. That produces a bunch of surplus young men who are eventually driven off. This sort of continually enforced dominance hierarchy, whatever you think of it morally, is poisonous to the kind of mindset and relationships you need to keep up our (extraordinarily good) airline safety record. And let me also add a plug for Dekker's "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'", which is on the surface about understanding airplane crashes, but does a great job of conveying why important technological systems require a very different way of thinking about things to succeed. One of my top books of all time, especially for anybody in tech who cares about uptime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_ Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven