Why were women so much better at inspecting bullets in WWII?
July 1, 2019 6:50 PM Subscribe
I once heard a story or a study about munitions workers in WWII. Maybe they made bullets. Or bombs. I can’t remember. But the women far outperformed the men at the same task, and I'd love to use this story in a current project. Can you identify the source? (details within)
* In a wartime munitions factory, workers would have to inspect the bullets-or-bombs before shipping them out to the front.
* The factory started hiring more women.
* The results spoke loud and clear: women were crushing men at this task. Their bombs-or-bullets performed way better in the field, resulting in fewer casualties, mis-fires, etc.
* The author goes on to say that the reason for this huge difference in performance was that the groups of women would actually get in a circle while they did their work and talk to each other about what they were finding, therefore improving the abilities of everyone in the group. (The men would just work solo.)
I don’t know if this was a Malcolm Gladwell type story or where I even first heard it, but Google is failing me right now. If you’ve heard this story or can identify its origin for me, I would be SO grateful.
* In a wartime munitions factory, workers would have to inspect the bullets-or-bombs before shipping them out to the front.
* The factory started hiring more women.
* The results spoke loud and clear: women were crushing men at this task. Their bombs-or-bullets performed way better in the field, resulting in fewer casualties, mis-fires, etc.
* The author goes on to say that the reason for this huge difference in performance was that the groups of women would actually get in a circle while they did their work and talk to each other about what they were finding, therefore improving the abilities of everyone in the group. (The men would just work solo.)
I don’t know if this was a Malcolm Gladwell type story or where I even first heard it, but Google is failing me right now. If you’ve heard this story or can identify its origin for me, I would be SO grateful.
I heard a story at the Rosie the Riveter Museum in CA that women welders making WWII war ships were much more detailed and neat than men because they had been taught how to do that via sewing and there was nothing that prepared men for that at all.
posted by bleep at 10:20 PM on July 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by bleep at 10:20 PM on July 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
Anecdotally, at plant tissue culture nurseries, a major part of the work is "cutting" of plant tissue from one jar of sterile media+plant material into another new jar of sterile media. Its a repetitive and boring job, but requires constant judgment calls and lots of careful delicate and dextrous fine work.
Even if hiring starts at 30/ 70 (female/ male), it ends up being 85/ 15 female/ male at steady state, in a fairly high turnover position (but we pay $18-24/ hr for these).
Dudes just don't have the patience/ fortitude/ discipline. We have to lateral a lot of them into cleaning/ media/ facilities instead of tissue culture and even then a lot of them drop out.
posted by porpoise at 12:35 AM on July 2, 2019 [5 favorites]
Even if hiring starts at 30/ 70 (female/ male), it ends up being 85/ 15 female/ male at steady state, in a fairly high turnover position (but we pay $18-24/ hr for these).
Dudes just don't have the patience/ fortitude/ discipline. We have to lateral a lot of them into cleaning/ media/ facilities instead of tissue culture and even then a lot of them drop out.
posted by porpoise at 12:35 AM on July 2, 2019 [5 favorites]
I won't go so far as to say it's a reason, but bear in mind that the hiring pools were significantly different -- the US military had more than a third of the male working-age population and around 1 percent of the female working-age population.
posted by Etrigan at 6:50 AM on July 2, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by Etrigan at 6:50 AM on July 2, 2019 [4 favorites]
because they had been taught how to do that via sewing
Related: "the circuits and programs of the Apollo flight computers were ... woven by hand, by women at a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. They sat at sophisticated looms, using long needles with wire attached to them instead of thread, carefully weaving the wiring that was the programming of the computers.
It was an astonishing process that was tedious yet required absolute attention and precision. Every single 1 and 0 in the computer’s memory required a wire in exactly the right place. A single mis-wired strand meant the computer’s programs wouldn’t work properly—and might fail at some critical, potentially disastrous moment.
The women who did this work had, in fact, been recruited from nearby textile factories. ... In the mid-1960s, there was a strike at the Waltham factory, and supervisors and managers tried to do the work the women had been doing. When the strike was over, every module the supervisors had wired was scrapped."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:16 AM on July 2, 2019 [14 favorites]
Related: "the circuits and programs of the Apollo flight computers were ... woven by hand, by women at a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. They sat at sophisticated looms, using long needles with wire attached to them instead of thread, carefully weaving the wiring that was the programming of the computers.
It was an astonishing process that was tedious yet required absolute attention and precision. Every single 1 and 0 in the computer’s memory required a wire in exactly the right place. A single mis-wired strand meant the computer’s programs wouldn’t work properly—and might fail at some critical, potentially disastrous moment.
The women who did this work had, in fact, been recruited from nearby textile factories. ... In the mid-1960s, there was a strike at the Waltham factory, and supervisors and managers tried to do the work the women had been doing. When the strike was over, every module the supervisors had wired was scrapped."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:16 AM on July 2, 2019 [14 favorites]
The story this reminded me of was the Calutron operators at Oak Ridge, TN refining uranium for the Manhattan Project
“The calutrons were initially operated by scientists from Berkeley to remove bugs and achieve a reasonable operating rate. Then the Tennessee Eastman operators took over. Nichols compared unit production data, and pointed out to Lawrence that the young "hillbilly" girl operators were outproducing his Ph.Ds. They agreed to a production race and Lawrence lost, a morale boost for the "Calutron Girls" and their supervisors. The women were trained like soldiers not to reason why, while "the scientists could not refrain from time-consuming investigation of the cause of even minor fluctuations of the dials".
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:30 AM on July 2, 2019 [3 favorites]
“The calutrons were initially operated by scientists from Berkeley to remove bugs and achieve a reasonable operating rate. Then the Tennessee Eastman operators took over. Nichols compared unit production data, and pointed out to Lawrence that the young "hillbilly" girl operators were outproducing his Ph.Ds. They agreed to a production race and Lawrence lost, a morale boost for the "Calutron Girls" and their supervisors. The women were trained like soldiers not to reason why, while "the scientists could not refrain from time-consuming investigation of the cause of even minor fluctuations of the dials".
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:30 AM on July 2, 2019 [3 favorites]
I haven't heard this specific story, but I have heard several like it, usually from business bros trying to explain why women outperform men by invoking either (1) evopsych pseudo-biological differences in task-oriented behavior (or in your example, community-oriented behavior) or (2) the belief women can be trained, like robots, "not to reason why" whereas men are just too intellectually curious to handle basic tasks.
If you're going to use this in a project, be aware that it reinforces pernicious gender stereotypes while masquerading as a cheerful anecdote about feminism.
posted by basalganglia at 8:41 AM on July 2, 2019 [36 favorites]
If you're going to use this in a project, be aware that it reinforces pernicious gender stereotypes while masquerading as a cheerful anecdote about feminism.
posted by basalganglia at 8:41 AM on July 2, 2019 [36 favorites]
much more detailed and neat than men because they had been taught how to do that via sewing and there was nothing that prepared men for that at all.
I am question. This sounds to me like a great just-so story, and reflects the way people probably thought about work then. But electricians, mechanics, sailors, fishers, factory workers, builders and fine carpenters, and many other male-dominated professions in that period also required excellent fine-motor skills and high levels of finish, even in repetitive tasks. So, though the presumably unique qualifications of women might have been a narrative in circulation at the time and continue to serve in memory, my historical brain tells me to treat that rationale as reflective of values and assumptions at the time about women, and the need for both employers and people in society generally to circulate a narrative that somehow made this work okay for women to be doing, instead of an actual truth about how women's lives "trained" them for this work differently.
posted by Miko at 1:32 PM on July 2, 2019 [15 favorites]
I am question. This sounds to me like a great just-so story, and reflects the way people probably thought about work then. But electricians, mechanics, sailors, fishers, factory workers, builders and fine carpenters, and many other male-dominated professions in that period also required excellent fine-motor skills and high levels of finish, even in repetitive tasks. So, though the presumably unique qualifications of women might have been a narrative in circulation at the time and continue to serve in memory, my historical brain tells me to treat that rationale as reflective of values and assumptions at the time about women, and the need for both employers and people in society generally to circulate a narrative that somehow made this work okay for women to be doing, instead of an actual truth about how women's lives "trained" them for this work differently.
posted by Miko at 1:32 PM on July 2, 2019 [15 favorites]
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posted by ptm at 8:26 PM on July 1, 2019 [1 favorite]