Warnings Gone Unheeded

In the months leading up to the October 7 massacre, repeated warnings from female border soldiers about suspicious Hamas activity were ignored by their superiors. According to Anat Peled, reporting in the Wall Street Journal, the soldiers’ observations were dismissed since the Israeli security services considered Hamas to be tamed and, the soldiers, who were at the bottom of the IDF hierarchy, were not taken seriously because they were women.

Review of important global crises reveals similar patterns, where women raise alarms about impending dangers based on information that contradicts conventional wisdom. They are often met with condescension, labeled as overly emotional, panicky, or alarmist and their concerns therefore dismissed, ignored, or even met with anger and aggression.

One example of this occurred on August 6, 2001, when a President’s Daily Brief (PDB) titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” was presented to George W. Bush. The PDB was prepared by members of a small group of women CIA analysts known as the “Sisterhood,” “the girls,” or disparagingly as, “a bunch of chicks”. It warned of “suspicious activity,” referenced the World Trade Center, plane hijackings, and the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S. These women, the first to identify and track the rise of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, struggled to have their voices heard and when they did, it was often a sexist response. After meeting with one analyst, CIA Director George Tenet described her as “a woman quivering with emotion.” The White House considered the PDB “historical reporting of old data” and left it like a letter unopened and unanswered.

Another example concerns the efforts of Brookley E. Born to secure regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, particularly “swaps” that contributed to the Great Recession. In 1998, as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), she appeared before Congress to warn that the ballooning derivatives market “threatens our economy without any federal agency knowing about it.” She faced strong opposition from Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan, who told Congress there was “no clear evidence” to support the proposed regulation. According to many commentators, Summers, known as the enforcer, “ran over” Born and “shouted her down”. Born said Summers’ stridency “made me very suspicious and troubled.” One CFTC colleague remarked that Born was seen as “someone they could flick off their hand like a fly.” In 1999, Congress stripped the CFTC of any authority to regulate derivatives, and Born resigned.

Two compelling examples, particularly when considered together, are the stories of Dr. Nancy Messonnier and Dr. Rachel Carson. On February 25, 2020, Dr. Messonnier became the first high-ranking U.S. official to warn that coronavirus would upend American life. In contradiction to Trump’s claim two days earlier that “This is very much under control,” she stated at a media briefing on COVID-19 that, “It’s not so much a question of if (community spread) will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when.” The next day Trump said, “Within a couple of days, it’s going to be down to close to zero.” However, he was enraged by Dr. Messonnier’s warning, and demanded her firing, evoking for many his catchphrase, “You’re fired! Get out!” She was promptly removed from public briefings on COVID-19, reassigned to another role in April, and was persuaded to resign in May.

Decades earlier, Dr. Rachel Carson published her landmark book Silent Spring (1962), which warned of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, particularly DDT. She faced intense personal and professional criticism from the chemical manufacturing industry, public officials, and parts of the media, including Time and U.S. News & World Report. Time described her as “hysterically over-emphatic,” and dismissed the book as an “emotional and inaccurate outburst.”  In contrast to today, the 1960s were considered a golden era for science, and Carson received broad support from the scientific community, President Kennedy and the American public. Her book led to a decade of environmental legislative initiatives and the establishment of the EPA in 1970.

In the aftermath, Born (who won the JFK Profile in Courage award) was described as “the hero of the Great Recession”, the CIA analysts as “the women who saw 9/11 coming”, Messonnier, the “truth teller” and Rachel Carson, “the mother of the environmental movement”. How many lives and livelihoods could have been saved had sense and science prevailed, had gender not been an added issue? As to the parents of the tatzpitaniyot, the killed and captured, they also are asking.