I'm reminded of a tragic event decades ago when US Navy pilot Kara Hultgreen ended up in the ocean with her plane. The attackers came out of the woodwork demanding for her training records to be released. The investigation did find she made a mistake. During that mess I was sitting in a Navy hospital waiting room and there was a Navy aviation safety magazine. I read through it and lo and behold, every single accident listed was due to (male) pilot error. I was born in 1960 and every job I've had, minus a few waitressing jobs early on, were in male dominated fields. I'm just cut that way, and my spatial and mechanical aptitudes are excellent. Our small farm is on a private, unimproved road, and I've been supervising roadwork, including clearing, bulldozing, creating rolling dips for water runoff, and laying a clay bed down over the sand to get it ready for gravel. I love this stuff but for my husband it would be torture, yet there are still those idiots who are bothered because we're not in the "correct" roles. My experience with men sounds similar to your experience. There are those who try and saboutage and undermine, but I've found the very smart and accomplished men have no trouble working with me. I figure the former men find me to be a threat to their egos, while the very accomplished men are confident and focused on doing good work and have no time for petty sex wars.
When I heard that the Skipper was a woman I shrugged and thought, que the misognist knee jerk reactions!
There is a high chance that the skipper was off duty at the time of impact, she could have been asleep in her bunk.
I've completed 16 ocean passages on small yachts, it's always the skippers responsibility if a ship founders but that doesn't mean that the skipper put it there!
In 1983, still anxious about my abilities I was 37. Six yrs later mayor of Thames Coromandel followed by big jobs, the biggest being one employing 3400 staff.
My mother was a farmer as was her mother & her aunt the principal of a big girls school. And before that doctors of medicine . I grew up knowing could do anything. In fact I think I may have grown up thinking that names were inferior to women.
Rubbish of course. We all have great abilities and greater or lesser abilities.
I just want to say were I a train driver I would have been an older brother backing you the whole way.
Forty years ago I was on a national teacher training course in Wellington for polytech tutors. There was a real spread of people : engineering (mechanical and electrical), building, agricultural and some scientists, including me. I was one of two women in a group of about twenty. Just for fun the facilitators decided to give us some spatial awareness tests and I scored best. They then gave us some more difficult ones and I still scored best, much to the consternation of ALL the males. There were rumblings, but these tests were impossible to cheat or rig. The men couldn't understand or accept that I did so well, especially the engineers. QED.
It's like when you keep beating them at pool at the pub. They're all good about it until you do it too many times, and more drinks are had. Then it's time to leave. Faaaast.
That has also been my experience. Again, years ago, two of my friends and I went to the public bar of the roughest pub in our small Waikato town because we felt like a game of pool. This was in the days when women did NOT go into the public bar. We knocked around for a bit then one of the men watching challenged me. Now I admit I wasn't exactly sober but I was feeling reckless and agreed . . . as you say, the knack is knowing when to leave!
Aaah the early 80's, the good old days. I remember them well. The harassment and misogyny was wall to wall, the stories I could tell.... But seriously, I have been utterly shocked by the global misogyny that instantly rose up from the Manawanui sinking. It appears that those males who are too scared to speak out about transgender men and the insane impact they are having on our society (women and children of course) feel emboldened to comment when it is a woman in the crosshairs. And a lesbian to boot.
And where are the strident and constant voices of support from the Antifa, Pro Hamas, Pride crew (aka rent A Mob) shouting down this misogyny? That's right, crickets.
To be fair, a lot of the vitriol has come from men who do not like the trans movement and have spoken out about it BUT then they partake in this abuse?
Makes me wonder how deep their support for women actually goes.
Omg THANK YOU Rachel Stewart. So beautifully, perfectly put, in every particular. This has been eating me up for days, thinking about my Mum, a lesbian cartographer, my sister, a pilot, me, a zipline & horse-trekking guide and radio operator, all of us cross-country riding, hammer-wielding women who can drive anything. I think about those days too, when they told me I probably wouldn't be able to do radio dispatch bc I was a woman, and men are just better at it (I did it for 25 years and outlasted every man I began with) and my Mum, who refused to be anyone else but who she was, a capable, strong woman, being harassed in the street by frothing men and sometimes women, spitting, screeching, “You, you, you're just…… a LESBIAN!”, and then when I wanted to stay home with my children (and still work from home), the message was that that was a lazy, do nothing option, for victims of the patriarchy who didn't know any better. Later, as a single mother, omg the hatred was off the charts, I should have been sterilised, I should be forcibly drug tested, I should have my children taken away, I was obviously a slut - letters to the editor in the newspaper used to make me feel sick, and afraid. I always felt just ever so slightly uneasy, with affirmative action, the faintest of disquiets, barely percepible, as though I was missing something, but I wanted that stuff to stop! I thought, it must be right, we can do all these things - but I was wrong. It's almost unbearable to see the naked loathing again, to realise it never went away, and what affirmative action became. Not everyone is a DEI hire. 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
I'm now waiting for the Air Force to name a woman to blame for the fact that their planes are so unreliable that the PM had to fly commercial. Surely there must be some woman who is happy to be a metaphorical punching bag?
Yep my stint as a WCC bus driver brought them out of the woodwork. Not the least being the gentleman at the bus stop on Katowice Road who looked at me when I opened the doors at the stop and said ‘I’m not getting on that bus’. Ok I said. Closed the doors. And drove off. My best memories are of older woman who so complimentary.
Great piece. I have noticed how few details of the rescue of the crew played out. Only Philip Crump has covered it in any detail. Truly miraculous that all lives were saved. This could so easily have been the worst naval disaster since WW2. https://cranmer.substack.com/p/hmnzs-manawanui.
As to the other issue the Public Services only mandated deference to DEI in 2020 with the new Public Services Act. Yvonne started as a naval officer and has 30 year's service. It is inconceivable that she does not have the knowledge base, the competence and the personal qualities for the role and highly unlikely there is any element to her career that has involved filling quotas or preferential appointments. How quickly this DEI monster has moved us from lauding our progressiveness in having good women in positions of power - Clark, Elias, Wilson, Gattung - to outright misogyny.
I am in awe of your resilience and tenacity to choose and maintain a career where you obviously weren’t welcomed with open arms by many your colleagues.
Once upon a time I thought “affirmative action” was a great idea because I thought it would act like a kind of reverse discrimination that would enable women, people of colour, and disadvantaged minorities to flourish in their chosen careers. How naïve was that (shakes head). It just didn’t occur to me that there would be a huge backlash and that people would assume that anyone from the aforementioned groups in a profession or job that had previously been the purview of white men would automatically be assumed to have got there, not on merit, but because of affirmative action. Now I know better.
So, as soon as I heard that the captain of the HMNZS Manawanui was a woman, I predicted that the “armchair admirals” would blame the sinking on XX chromosomes. Sadly, I wasn’t proved wrong.
I'm reminded of a tragic event decades ago when US Navy pilot Kara Hultgreen ended up in the ocean with her plane. The attackers came out of the woodwork demanding for her training records to be released. The investigation did find she made a mistake. During that mess I was sitting in a Navy hospital waiting room and there was a Navy aviation safety magazine. I read through it and lo and behold, every single accident listed was due to (male) pilot error. I was born in 1960 and every job I've had, minus a few waitressing jobs early on, were in male dominated fields. I'm just cut that way, and my spatial and mechanical aptitudes are excellent. Our small farm is on a private, unimproved road, and I've been supervising roadwork, including clearing, bulldozing, creating rolling dips for water runoff, and laying a clay bed down over the sand to get it ready for gravel. I love this stuff but for my husband it would be torture, yet there are still those idiots who are bothered because we're not in the "correct" roles. My experience with men sounds similar to your experience. There are those who try and saboutage and undermine, but I've found the very smart and accomplished men have no trouble working with me. I figure the former men find me to be a threat to their egos, while the very accomplished men are confident and focused on doing good work and have no time for petty sex wars.
Indeed.
When I heard that the Skipper was a woman I shrugged and thought, que the misognist knee jerk reactions!
There is a high chance that the skipper was off duty at the time of impact, she could have been asleep in her bunk.
I've completed 16 ocean passages on small yachts, it's always the skippers responsibility if a ship founders but that doesn't mean that the skipper put it there!
In 1983, still anxious about my abilities I was 37. Six yrs later mayor of Thames Coromandel followed by big jobs, the biggest being one employing 3400 staff.
My mother was a farmer as was her mother & her aunt the principal of a big girls school. And before that doctors of medicine . I grew up knowing could do anything. In fact I think I may have grown up thinking that names were inferior to women.
Rubbish of course. We all have great abilities and greater or lesser abilities.
I just want to say were I a train driver I would have been an older brother backing you the whole way.
I know you would be.
Forty years ago I was on a national teacher training course in Wellington for polytech tutors. There was a real spread of people : engineering (mechanical and electrical), building, agricultural and some scientists, including me. I was one of two women in a group of about twenty. Just for fun the facilitators decided to give us some spatial awareness tests and I scored best. They then gave us some more difficult ones and I still scored best, much to the consternation of ALL the males. There were rumblings, but these tests were impossible to cheat or rig. The men couldn't understand or accept that I did so well, especially the engineers. QED.
Yup, tell me about it.
It's like when you keep beating them at pool at the pub. They're all good about it until you do it too many times, and more drinks are had. Then it's time to leave. Faaaast.
That has also been my experience. Again, years ago, two of my friends and I went to the public bar of the roughest pub in our small Waikato town because we felt like a game of pool. This was in the days when women did NOT go into the public bar. We knocked around for a bit then one of the men watching challenged me. Now I admit I wasn't exactly sober but I was feeling reckless and agreed . . . as you say, the knack is knowing when to leave!
Aaah the early 80's, the good old days. I remember them well. The harassment and misogyny was wall to wall, the stories I could tell.... But seriously, I have been utterly shocked by the global misogyny that instantly rose up from the Manawanui sinking. It appears that those males who are too scared to speak out about transgender men and the insane impact they are having on our society (women and children of course) feel emboldened to comment when it is a woman in the crosshairs. And a lesbian to boot.
And where are the strident and constant voices of support from the Antifa, Pro Hamas, Pride crew (aka rent A Mob) shouting down this misogyny? That's right, crickets.
To be fair, a lot of the vitriol has come from men who do not like the trans movement and have spoken out about it BUT then they partake in this abuse?
Makes me wonder how deep their support for women actually goes.
Omg THANK YOU Rachel Stewart. So beautifully, perfectly put, in every particular. This has been eating me up for days, thinking about my Mum, a lesbian cartographer, my sister, a pilot, me, a zipline & horse-trekking guide and radio operator, all of us cross-country riding, hammer-wielding women who can drive anything. I think about those days too, when they told me I probably wouldn't be able to do radio dispatch bc I was a woman, and men are just better at it (I did it for 25 years and outlasted every man I began with) and my Mum, who refused to be anyone else but who she was, a capable, strong woman, being harassed in the street by frothing men and sometimes women, spitting, screeching, “You, you, you're just…… a LESBIAN!”, and then when I wanted to stay home with my children (and still work from home), the message was that that was a lazy, do nothing option, for victims of the patriarchy who didn't know any better. Later, as a single mother, omg the hatred was off the charts, I should have been sterilised, I should be forcibly drug tested, I should have my children taken away, I was obviously a slut - letters to the editor in the newspaper used to make me feel sick, and afraid. I always felt just ever so slightly uneasy, with affirmative action, the faintest of disquiets, barely percepible, as though I was missing something, but I wanted that stuff to stop! I thought, it must be right, we can do all these things - but I was wrong. It's almost unbearable to see the naked loathing again, to realise it never went away, and what affirmative action became. Not everyone is a DEI hire. 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
Thank YOU for that.
It’s all been so dispiriting to watch.
I'm now waiting for the Air Force to name a woman to blame for the fact that their planes are so unreliable that the PM had to fly commercial. Surely there must be some woman who is happy to be a metaphorical punching bag?
Yep my stint as a WCC bus driver brought them out of the woodwork. Not the least being the gentleman at the bus stop on Katowice Road who looked at me when I opened the doors at the stop and said ‘I’m not getting on that bus’. Ok I said. Closed the doors. And drove off. My best memories are of older woman who so complimentary.
… that is Karori Road
How did you get 'Katowice'?
That's epic.
Great piece. I have noticed how few details of the rescue of the crew played out. Only Philip Crump has covered it in any detail. Truly miraculous that all lives were saved. This could so easily have been the worst naval disaster since WW2. https://cranmer.substack.com/p/hmnzs-manawanui.
As to the other issue the Public Services only mandated deference to DEI in 2020 with the new Public Services Act. Yvonne started as a naval officer and has 30 year's service. It is inconceivable that she does not have the knowledge base, the competence and the personal qualities for the role and highly unlikely there is any element to her career that has involved filling quotas or preferential appointments. How quickly this DEI monster has moved us from lauding our progressiveness in having good women in positions of power - Clark, Elias, Wilson, Gattung - to outright misogyny.
Yes, indeed to all of that.
The only thing I'd take some issue with is the use of "good" to describe those four women. I would replace it with 'competent'.
Yes - you are right on that.
Well said!
Absolutely amazing piece Rachel.
Cheers, mate.
Someone had to say it.
Abso-fucken-lutely
What a great read!
I am in awe of your resilience and tenacity to choose and maintain a career where you obviously weren’t welcomed with open arms by many your colleagues.
Once upon a time I thought “affirmative action” was a great idea because I thought it would act like a kind of reverse discrimination that would enable women, people of colour, and disadvantaged minorities to flourish in their chosen careers. How naïve was that (shakes head). It just didn’t occur to me that there would be a huge backlash and that people would assume that anyone from the aforementioned groups in a profession or job that had previously been the purview of white men would automatically be assumed to have got there, not on merit, but because of affirmative action. Now I know better.
So, as soon as I heard that the captain of the HMNZS Manawanui was a woman, I predicted that the “armchair admirals” would blame the sinking on XX chromosomes. Sadly, I wasn’t proved wrong.
Thanks for your comment.
I'm not driving trains now, of course, but the experience is seared into my brain. Now that I'm older and wiser I realise how much it has shaped me.
Good piece, neither knee-jerking in one direction nor the other....
Thanks.