A few years ago, it was revealed that the senior PR executive at Boeing had…more than 2 decades earlier, when he was a Navy pilot…published a paper arguing against the use of women as combat pilots.

He was forced out of his job.

He was encouraged to publish his thesis, his response: “are you crazy, if I did I would never get a job in academia.”

His data showed female executives tended more political, vicious and likely to undermine co-workers, as they worked towards promotion. Perhaps necessary up to that time (1990s), but not constructive traits.

He did go on to work at UVa, in the administration, not as a prof.

BTW, I very much like the concept of “progressor”.
(You may have—if inadvertently—coined an ingenious job title! And college major!!)

…One perfectly suited for today’s “woke-work/study/living/coercing” environment (and also perfect for walking off cliffs…but not before causing as much damage as possible….).

This is a kind of ‘diversity’ that is pretty much totally ignored in today’s Diversity discussions.

I don’t buy into the underlying Jungian jargon, but I do think he and his successors sorted out the major personality preferences accurately enough to be useful. It’s used a lot in career counseling; not as a hard-and-fast rule in the sense that “Type X could never be happy in Job Y” but helping to identify where you might actually be more comfortable working.
https://careerassessmentsite.com/myers-briggs-test/mbti-personality-types/careers/istj/

We and all the boys “typed” ourselves, and it helped in defusing conflicts for them to remember “oh yeah, he’s the Extrovert” or having the Thinking types (a majority of our crew) consciously adjusting to work with the Feeling brother (and vice versa) — instead of just believing something was wrong with them (or the other guys).

What was most helpful to me was learning that all personality traits (and their 4-part types) are exhibited by both men and women, but their distributions for the sexes (there are only two) are not the same.

https://www.slayerment.com/mbti-gender

I am an ISTJ, which is much more prevalent among men, but not unknown among women.
FWIW, I would much rather work with Sgt Mom’s NCOs than the officers’ wives’ club, but over the years I have learned how to do both, mostly by treating groups that function differently than I would as a field exercise in anthropological observation.

My children believe I should have been either a drill sergeant or the Mother Superior of a medieval abbey.

Interesting points. I hadn’t heard of Richard’s point.

Bruce’s points are a slightly different tangent to mine. I think women’s groups can be more cliquish than men’s. Things like a husband’s military rank is just one of many things that can factor into being included or excluded in a clique. I get Bruce’s point about male hierarchy. Perhaps because my environment was an academic one, I didn’t see that much.

To overgeneralize my earlier point, both men and women can lose control of their egos, and it tends to manifest differently. Cliquish behavior is a particularly unhelpful(?) manifestation.

On yet another tangent, I really like the pro’s vs. con’s style of analysis even though it is supposed to be poor editorial or op-ed practice. In a group problem solving environment, I’m not sure. I can see the advantages, but also that it could diffuse the focus and slow the process.

If I understand the reference correctly, there were also a large group of women in the US and UK who flew the fighters and bombers from the point of manufacture to remote hubs or distribution points. In the US, some of those hubs were places where extensive retrofitting was done either for the Pacific theater or the European theater. According to a documentary I saw, while it wasn’t combat, it wasn’t a trivial job either.

https://www.lean.org/lexicon-terms/training-within-industry-twi/

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196138/aaf-training-during-wwii/

Note that the primary training was done by contracted civilian flight instructors. A little surprising that there were enough of them.

One time, later in the period, I mentioned in a faculty meeting that the greatest educational institution in American history was the US Army Air Corps as it taught 200,000 men to fly in three years. That was not a popular sentiment in the female faculty.

Such as Ted Williams, who became a pilot- and by most measures an outstanding one- without any college. Those tests picked out his talent. Ted may have been a stubborn so-and-so, but he wasn’t stupid, and those tests detected that. I can think of other examples of the armed forces tests picking out talent among my relatives that would have otherwise not been noticed.