China girl, pt. 2: sex and violence - how the psychosexual pathology of American defense paired with China's 45% female workforce builds America's future defeat
Or how we built a $110 billion boys' club talking about vertical erector launchers and other reasons why women leave defense while China arms itself using half their workforce
Part 2’s subsections
All we have is words, all we have is worlds - defense tech’s sexualized discourse
The language that kills careers - from discourse to documented harm
From words to harassment to diversity - what research shows about homogeneous vs. diverse teams
The innovation cost of homogenous thinking - when exclusion becomes economic sabotage
We’ve built a system so perfectly calibrated to exclude women that it’s practically art. While we’re sitting here admiring our magnificent self-sabotage, China has massively increased their participation of women in defense tech through both policies and institutional support, which is how they’re building the weapons that will make ours in America obsolete with a workforce fueled in part by 46% women.
The introduction to this series and Part 1 established China’s competitive advantages from having millions of women participating in their defense tech pipeline which is now producing 10x our drone fleet, closing AI gaps in 13 months that should take 5-7 years, and acquiring weapons 5-6x faster.
Now let’s examine the mechanisms of our self-destruction through institutional, cultural, policy, and economic lenses - in part 2, the mechanism is the language of defense tech, where professionally discussing “vertical erector launchers” and “deep penetration” is the de facto norm. Here I’ll specifically examine how defense technology’s sexualized discourse actively filters out women through linguistic and cultural mechanisms that signal hostile territory to women.
Key points:
Carol Cohn’s 1984 study on defense tech intellectuals documented “vertical erector launchers,” “deep penetration,” “thrust-to-weight ratios”, and more
Defense wraps everything in genital metaphors: equipment, strategy, outcomes
83% of women in cleared professions report witnessing/experiencing discrimination
The language that excludes women also disconnects us from reality - we optimize for theoretical conflicts while China builds hypersonic missiles
The 1980s were known for many things, including questionable hairstyles, incredible new wave music, and the Cold War, which is when Carol Cohn spent a year with defense intellectuals and became immersed in the industry’s discourse. What has been tucked away as academic feminism to be ignored for forty years is something that reads modern and pressing, which signals to me that it’s a timeless issue (take that as you will).
Want to understand why defense technology hemorrhages women? Start with how we talk about weapons.
The entire linguistic framework of American defense runs on barely sublimated sexual metaphors where missiles “penetrate” targets, where equipment that positions missiles to fire are known as “vertical erector” launchers, where we discuss “thrust-to-weight ratios” with the seriousness of seminary students studying scripture.
Nothing is sacred or safe, even in the abstraction of humanity’s hydrogen-helped holocaust as the phrase “losing their virginity” is also used when talking about countries crossing nuclear thresholds or launching their first nuclear weapon.
Imagine being a woman in a room full of men earnestly debating “deep penetration”, “payload delivery”, and “target softening” and tell me that’s a sustainable neutral professional environment.
One is not naive to think this is unique to the parlance of defense - there’s psychosexual parlance across industries. We can talk about penetrating markets in management, penetration testing in cybersecurity, penetrating the defense in sports commentary, naked short selling in finance, and plenty more.
Yet there’s something particularly off-putting about the language of defense tech that makes it so odious, and that’s because of its difference between the abstract and the literal. Consider how the sexualization isn’t as thick in other industries because they use sexual language for abstract competition, but in defense, the penetration is literal, the intended successful climax is death, and the functional rendering of language ties back to sex. Defense wraps everything in genital metaphors - the equipment, the strategy, the outcomes.
Such crassness cripples capability and conversations to compete with China. It’s language that’s repellant to women because sexualized weapons jargon is a universal red flag across every technical field as a symbol and signal that professionalism is optional, boundaries can be blurred, competence is replaced by performative masculinity, and that women will be treated as outsiders in a culture where the very language predicts harassment, dismisses dissent, and guarantees their expertise won’t be taken seriously.
America’s advantage depends on absorbing every capable brain, but the sexualized, hyper-abstracted, techno-masculine discourse of defense is a filtering mechanism that actively works towards reinforcing how not to capture female participation and brainpower that the country needs to compete with China, who is happily leveraging all of its people without making it penile and weird.
The language that kills careers
I want to be very clear that this is something that debilitates the defense industry at every level - it is not theoretical academic feminism that you can dismiss with an eye-roll. Research connecting sexualized workplace jargon to actual harassment is extensive, peer reviewed, and comes from your own institutions. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has found that organizational climate is the single strongest predictor of whether sexual harassment occurs.
When the Canadian Armed Forces finally commissioned an external review of their sexual misconduct crisis, investigators documented an “underlying sexualized culture” of rape jokes, sexual innuendo, and demeaning language that directly contributed to what they termed a “culture of misogyny” facilitating sexual harassment and assault. The review was explicit about causation, not correlation as pervasive use of demeaning language and sexual jokes was “integrally related” to higher rates of serious sexual misconduct.
Geoscience researchers found that body metaphors turning sexual create environments where harassment flourishes, with one scientist noting that using sexualized language “in itself constitutes a hostile environment.“ This pattern holds across technical fields - when crude sexual or militarized jargon becomes normal workplace banter, it is not just off putting, it is predictive of harassment to come. Such environments signal that boundaries are negotiable, that objections will be dismissed as oversensitivity, and that the culture values performative masculinity over actual competence.
Studies of masculinity contest cultures show these environments breed toxic leadership, bullying, and rule breaking while trust and psychological safety collapse.When I point out the discourse in defense is problematic for women, it’s because the words we use have so much power that we take for granted until we’re in the thick of it, or unless perhaps we think of what being silenced or silencing another does to a person’s agency. This is why language that excludes women also disconnects us from reality and sexualized discourse is not a separate problem from our strategic failures - it is part of the same exclusionary problem, just wearing different clothes.
From words to harassment to diversity: what research shows
As Cohn observed, this language establishes who belongs and women who try to enter this world face an impossible choice to either adopt the language and lose part of themselves, or resist it and be marginalized. Cohn watched women try both strategies, where the adopters became “honorary men” but were never fully accepted, whereas the resisters were pushed out as “too emotional” or “not strategic enough.” The result is a self-reinforcing culture that doesn’t just happen to exclude women but is designed to make them maximally uncomfortable. Yet know diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones, which is not feel-good diversity propaganda, it is researched and documented fact.
McKinsey found diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform. Boston Consulting found they generate 19% more innovation revenue. In tech, mixed-gender teams’ patents are cited 26-42% more often. Even when controlling for factors like industry and company size, multiple studies still find that more diverse teams tend to innovate more and perform better financially. Why? It’s because homogeneous groups get stuck, they converge on consensus but miss breakthrough ideas, they have inertia by default of sharing the same everything.
Diverse groups take longer to gel but explore more of the solution space, and that means, for example, concretely in defense terms, our predominately homogenous teams are really good at incremental improvements to existing systems but they may miss paradigm shifts. For example, when Google’s photo AI started labeling Black people as gorillas, it wasn’t deliberate racism. It was a homogeneous team that literally didn’t test on darker skin because they didn’t think to. The failure case wasn’t in their mental model. It literally did not occur to them.
Commercial facial recognition is 99% accurate on light-skinned men but only 65% accurate on dark-skinned women. That’s what homogeneous development teams produce. Now imagine that blindness in a military AI for target recognition. Or autonomous weapons. Or intelligence analysis. We’re building systems with baked-in blind spots because the teams building them all have the same perspectives. In a later post I’m going to share how female analysts figured out how to find Bin Laden by analyzing laundry patterns. I wonder who handled the laundry for readers while they were growing up, and how connections between gender and innovation in thought can be made concrete on the personal and professional level here. What I’m pointing out is that in military AI, such blindness means misidentified targets, missed threats, dead civilians. There is so much ground to cover with all that we don’t know, but there is something else we also do know.
One more thing - in addition to the war fighting part, do you know what men at war have done for hundreds of years? They’ve dressed up as women. Or they’ve sent women to do their bidding. What do men do when they want to escape or infiltrate an area with enemies? They dress up as women. What does this tell us? We know there’s ways of going about the world and understanding it which differ, and we can use it to our advantage (or it can be used to our disadvantage). How dumb are we to ignore that when we apply it on a grander scale by bringing in more thought and perspectives?
The innovation cost of homogenous thinking
A female engineer at a major contractor told researchers she had to become “buddy-buddy” with male colleagues just to get basic information needed for her job. Another described walking across the factory floor to catcalls. In a ClearanceJobs survey of 1,200 cleared professionals, 83% of women reported witnessing or experiencing gender discrimination.
The thing is, this lack of diversity in thought and sexual harassment status quo isn’t hidden, it’s well-documented and has been verified across decades of research, and yet the industry response has been to do essentially nothing structural about it.
China has women making up 45% of their science and technology workforce while our defense tech teams remain overwhelmingly male. They’re getting the innovation bonus we’re leaving on the table. That’s why they’re rapidly closing capability gaps we thought would take years longer. If China is tapping more of its talent pool (including women) while a rival systematically underutilizes half its population, that’s strategically dumb.
Throughout this part, I’ve discussed how the linguistic framework of defense establishes who belongs, and how women who enter face an impossible choice: adopt the language and lose part of themselves, or resist and be marginalized. The result is a self-reinforcing culture that doesn’t just happen to exclude women, but it’s designed to. It’s one of many mechanisms that does so. Carol Cohn documented this forty years ago. Not much has changed in that the weapons got more sophisticated while our language stayed adolescent.
This is my Tribute to Olivia Nuzzi comment.