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

Women’s entry into the workforce has been well-documented by many social scientists and labor historians, but Polly Reed Myers’s Capitalist Family Values: Gender, Work, and Corporate Culture at Boeing provides a unique and nuanced account of the intersection between gender and workplace culture during Boeing’s hundred year history. Myers asserts, and documents with company archival data as well as published, public records, that Boeing’s company identity was intentionally founded upon several values, most notably those of “family,” “heteronormativity,” “fraternalism,” and “patriarchal capitalism.” Against these pervasive and firmly grounded company ideals, women and all nonwhite minorities encountered much difficulty in making progress towards equal representation and respect within all sectors of the Boeing organization. By providing in-depth assessments of selected events from Boeing’s history, Myers illustrates how the company, moreover, leveraged these ideals both to stabilize employment during times of growth and change as well as restrict women and minorities from obtaining positions of greater import, security, and authority.

Capitalist Family Values begins by connecting recent company events, such as the IAM’s (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers) strained contract negotiations in 2013, to this concept of Boeing-as-family, and traces the development of this ideal during the company’s early years. The establishment and development of the company paper, Boeing News in the 1930s, for example, routinely announced employee marriages, births of employees’ children, parties, and educational achievements. These cozy, personalized stories communicated the impression that Boeing was a stable place to work for generations of employees, facilitated a sense of a close-knit community, but also reinforced a value of fraternalism among heterosexual white men. Myers’s judicious use of these accounts illustrates Boeing’s romanticized concept of family and the in-group favoritism it bestowed upon this selected subset of their workforce.

Although WWII (Chapter 2) ushered in opportunity for women and African American men, Myers shows that they were added to the workforce only out of necessity to meet the overwhelming production needs during the early 1940s. Boeing leaders resisted hiring women, opting instead to hire sixteen-year-old boys in some cases, even as the company simplified construction so that planes could be assembled more efficiently and with less skilled labor, a fact that was advertised to women in Boeing’s recruitment materials to convince potential applicants of the ease with which they could transition from housework to plane-work. Myers also documents, however, Boeing’s actual disinterest in authentic change: in Boeing news publications during this time, women and blacks were portrayed as “anomalies” or as non-serious workers whose temporary status was part of their patriotic duty. In the post-war, Cold War culture, masculinity, and toughness were again reemphasized as values in the company. Myers observes that in 1948, the demographic profile of employees was roughly the same as it had been prewar, and concludes that “the family metaphor became less about creating an inclusive atmosphere of loyalty and fraternalism than it was about articulating a model of exclusivity upon which power and privilege were asserted” (94).

This ethos of exclusivity was also articulated by the women who were interviewed for Boeing’s Oral History project—an effort in the late 1980s initially designed to celebrate women’s achievements as part of the company’s 75th anniversary, but ultimately scrapped because their sentiment was so overwhelmingly, and evidently to company leaders, surprisingly, negative. Chapter 3 describes that what these interviews revealed, besides widespread discrimination and overt harassment, was that the fraternal networks and male-dominated environment produced what Myers labels as “gendered imagination”—where such deep and inculcated gender stereotypes resulted in the inability even to envision a new and enlightened workplace. Moreover, changes to the law, such as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, seriously challenged these entrenched assumptions, and Myers illustrates how Boeing was extremely slow to progress and failed to...