I’m inclined to cite not so much “sexism” as “32-minute rant”. For all I care, it could be tabs vs spaces, with the same outcome.
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 - the captain sat there and blabbed for 32 minutes including something so objectionable as musing about how if annoying women get murdered, it's their fault. Quoth the article:
> “These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to,” he said. “You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead, you know… they start punching them and kicking them, and they lost their minds, you know… they kill the woman… it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?”
But the first officer was not empowered to object to that - not empowered to object for sexism and murder, not for tabs vs spaces, not for anything. There was, therefore, possibly nothing the captain could have said in that 32 minutes that the first officer would have objected to.
Just in case it's news to anyone: they absolutely do. It's very eye opening when you witness such things. Women can be and often are just as hateful as men.
Hate is a normal human emotion.
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_ Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven