Member-only story
Captain Sandy Yawn and the Impossibility of Female Leadership, especially with women
Bravo’s Below Deck Med Captain and the leadership criticism online from mostly other women
There are a lot of women who love to hate on other women and give passes to men. Broad statement, sure, but there’s truth there; and when it comes to women in leadership positions especially, women can be especially catty and build up no-win scenarios.
It’s already difficult enough to be a woman in a male-dominated industry like yachting. Add to that rising through the ranks to become the captain of your own luxury yacht. That is quite the accomplishment for anyone, but for a woman, you are literally an underdog. Not many captains would give a female greenie the chance to climb up the ranks as deck crew, especially not during the era in which Sandy Yawn was climbing up the ranks. Yachting, even in today’s terms, is very much an affluent, white man’s world.
Imagine all that hard work just to have female strangers online criticize your approach as being “overbearing, micro-managing, bitchy, etc.”
I know the difficulty Sandy Yawn has probably had to deal with her entire career because I too am a woman who rose through the ranks in a white male-dominated line of business. I worked…
