Capitalist Family Values: Gender, Work, and Corporate Culture at Boeing by Polly Reed Myers

Abstract

Polly Reed Myers’s book began, she tells us, with one box in the Boeing Historical Archives. The result is a “micro-level” analysis, organized into case studies, that examines the gendered work culture of the Boeing Corporation between World War II and the dawn of the twenty-first century (8). Myers demonstrates how the shift from World War II–era fraternal welfare capitalism to twenty-first century neoliberalism affected gender equality in large corporations. She argues that Boeing’s corporate culture, which “relied on a fraternal social order that emphasized masculine heterosexual norms,” excluded women and trans people from the Boeing “family” and privileged heterosexual male breadwinners (34). Gender equality was slow to come to Boeing, even after gendered metaphors about the patriarchal corporate “family” gave way to seemingly equitable rhetoric about the company “team” in the late twentieth century. Neoliberalism tended to diminish male workers’ privilege but did not necessarily usher in gender equality.Fraternalism, Myers argues, was the heart of Boeing’s corporate culture, both in how the company defined the corporate “family” and how it imagined workers’ roles in their own families. Boeing leaders began to claim a “family” relationship between workers and managers during the Great Depression, when they hoped workers would accept lower wages in return for a sense of corporate belonging. This strategy helped Boeing leaders weather hard economic times by encouraging workers to identify with the company instead of labor unions. One of the key vehicles for the development of this family metaphor was the Boeing News, a company newsletter that reported workers’ life events and detailed fraternal outings like stag parties and sporting events. In announcing workers’ marriages and new babies, the Boeing News presented its workers as breadwinners in heterosexual families whose shared commitment to the fraternal ideal bound them to one another and to the company as a whole.Women workers poured into Boeing during World War II but their presence did little to disrupt this imagined fraternal family. Boeing leaders and male workers both viewed women as temporarily filling in for male breadwinners away at war. Thus, women’s war work only “bolstered the idea of the heteronormative breadwinner family model” (78). Boeing leaders hired women reluctantly and, once hired, women workers found achieving advancement difficult. Other workers also excluded women and nonwhites, giving them only temporary status in the union (71). Although intersections between gender and race do not feature prominently in the book, Myers points out that women’s presence in the company during the war exacerbated racial inequality, offering the union and company leaders another reason for segregating lunchrooms and restrooms. The union and management both independently suggested building an all-black plant in an effort to meet war needs and avoid integration (79, 82). In this instance, fraternal corporate culture underlay both gender and racial inequality.Indeed, fraternalism at Boeing remained remarkably consistent, even in the face of legal changes that outlawed discrimination. Although feminists made headway in demanding equal opportunity, Boeing corporate culture continued to rest on “fraternal networks defined by the assumptions of heteronormative patriarchal capitalism” (96). Formal gender equality may have arrived in the workplace by the 1970s, but, at Boeing, male managers still controlled promotion and raises and favored male recruiting networks through the local university. Women who managed to get a job at Boeing faced hostility from male coworkers. Even as they touted diversity, Boeing leaders engaged in “widely known, pervasive, and systemic gender discrimination” (175).Boeing’s commitment to the fraternal ideal did not stop at the exclusion of women. The fraternal ideal rested on a clearly defined gender binary. When trans people challenged this gender binary, Boeing leaders doubled down on enforcing particular kinds of gendered performance. In what is her strongest chapter, Myers relates the story of “Jane Doe” who transitioned from male to female while working at Boeing in the 1980s. Although by all accounts Doe was an exemplary employee, she was eventually fired for wearing women’s clothing and using the women’s restroom. Even as the company family model was beginning to fray, corporate culture remained invested in maintaining an unambiguously gendered workplace where power was unevenly distributed.By the 1990s, the neoliberal shift in the relationship between workers and managers was complete. The family metaphor that had bound workers and corporate leaders together and helped the company survive economic calamities like the Depression now seemed to Boeing leaders a cumbersome “liability that limited global competitiveness by holding corporations responsible for workers in a way that could hinder profits and flexibility” (158). Boeing leaders began to refer to their workers as “team members,” a term that suggested less corporate obligation than “family.” The result of this shift for women at Boeing was mixed. On the one hand, remnants of the fraternal corporate culture remained. On the other, neoliberal policies tended to have a leveling effect as men lost relative status and teamwork metaphors pointed to the need for diversity (170). These changes, however, came at a time when the benefits of working at a company like Boeing, including job security and regular raises, were largely gone.Myers’s work suggests the ways in which histories of gender, labor, and business can be fruitfully combined to ask bigger questions about the widespread effects of capitalism. One area that Myers leaves unexplored, however, is how defense spending tied Boeing’s corporate culture to federal policy. Although she mentions Boeing’s dependence on defense contracts during and after World War II, Myers does not address the ways in which federal defense spending reinforced Boeing’s gendered work culture. Rather than a product of insular company policy, then, corporate fraternal culture was supported by federal dollars both at Boeing and, one imagines, at defense contractors around the nation. This broader question aside, Capitalist Family Values is a deeply researched examination of how gendered work cultures functioned throughout a watershed period in the history of capitalism and globalization.