Seedlings in the Corporate Forest: Communicating Benevolent Sexism in Dow Chemical’s First Internal Affirmative-Action Campaign

Introduction

On April 30, 1975, Violete Stevens filed for a solo patent on behalf of her work at the Dow Chemical Company. The patent, for polymercaptoesters of polyglycidols (Stevens, 1977), was a great achievement—one Stevens would repeat once more that year when she was granted another patent for linear copolymers of glycidol (Stevens et al., 1977). Her work required extensive research and served to benefit Dow for decades as the company developed consumer resins. Yet when Stevens, a senior research chemist, was featured in Dow’s first affirmative-action campaign, “Know More in ’74” (KMi74), her patents were not discussed. Instead, Dow characterized Stevens’s scientific contributions to the company as a “hobby,” one that “doesn’t take her to a snowy ski slope, a painter’s easel, or a potter’s wheel, but instead leads her to Dow’s Central Research Lab in Midland” (“The hobby of a whole job,” 1974, para. 1).

What is especially notable about Stevens’s portrayal in the KMi74 campaign is not that her research contributions were downplayed—she was not the first nor the last woman in science to be characterized in this way (e.g., Jensen et al., 2019; Rossiter, 1993; Smith & Garrett-Scott, 2021)—but, rather, that Dow coupled this diminishment of her contributions with statements of seemingly overwhelming support for women in the workplace and affirmative-action initiatives. Indeed, enthusiasm for this campaign saturated the company-produced literature, but KMi74’s failure to attend to details such as Stevens’ very real professional accomplishments at the company provides a telling clue about why such campaigns have, since their launch with the passage of U.S. affirmative-action legislation in the late 1960s, failed to translate more clearly into sex-and-gender equity, recognition, and leadership in the workplace, scientific or otherwise (Elias, 2018; Krawiec, 2003; MacLean, 2010).

For several key reasons, Dow’s KMi74 pamphlets offer an especially illuminating case study through which to consider the historical trajectory of this failure at a discursive level. For one, Dow was (and still remains) a highly visible entity as one of the country’s largest and most profitable chemical companies and a major employer of both unskilled and specialized workers (Chandler, 2005). For another, Dow was one of the first large companies to respond to a legislative requirement regarding equality in the workplace, in part because of its role as a government contractor beginning as early as World War I (National Economic Conversion Commission [NECC], 1970). When KMi74 debuted, it functioned as a direct response to the 1967 amendment of Executive Order 11,246, which added sex to the list of protected categories upheld under affirmative-action legislation passed during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The 1967 amendment, coupled with women’s significantly increased involvement in the U.S. labor force beginning in the mid-1960s (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017) and growing national attention directed at what would today be called Dow’s “corporate social responsibility” infractions (Chandler, 2005; Hay, 2011; Kernisky, 1997; Müller, 2018), ensured that Dow’s initiative in support of the new legislative mandate would be examined closely by multiple stakeholders. Ultimately, KMi74’s materials were upheld publicly as not only compliant but also as good practice by the U.S. Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, a recognition that situated KMi74 as a model for internal, affirmative-action initiatives nationwide in the years to come (Committee on the Analysis of Executive Order 11246, 1982).

In what follows, we offer an analysis of KMi74’s six extensive campaign pamphlets to identify the specific discursive mechanisms set by Dow to comply with affirmative-action legislation. Our exploratory analyses of the pamphlets revealed that KMi74 upheld a framework of what has been more recently theorized as “benevolent sexism” wherein women are positioned covertly as inherently inferior to men, often under cover of support for inclusivity and change, though with the caveat of women’s need for patriarchal support and protection (Glick & Fiske, 1996; Glick et al., 2004). In organizational contexts, benevolent sexism has been recognized for its “insidious dangers” to women employees’ performance in terms of limiting their exposure to professional challenges and opportunities and even—over time—facilitating the development of increasingly hostile sexist attitudes (Dardenne et al., 2007, p. 764; Sibley et al., 2007); and, in the context of STEM fields and organizations specifically, benevolent sexism has been associated with a host of negative educational and professionalization outcomes (Kuchynka et al., 2018; see also Stone et al., 2020). Following our exploratory analysis, our subsequent qualitative, textual investigation of the pamphlets revealed that benevolent sexism was upheld therein through three central appeals related to: (a) vagueness via generalization and absurdity, (b) circularity via redundancy and buzzwords, and (c) disingenuity via bait and switch argumentation. Ultimately, we find that these appeals functioned in concert to create an affirmative-action agenda lacking in the argumentative warrants necessary for either immediate or long-term organizational change. Moreover, we consider the ongoing function and impact of these communicative strategies to demonstrate how this particular campaign created a historical, organizational script for contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, a precedent that must be not just identified but also countered to effectively disarticulate organizational stagnation and sex- and gender-based inequality in the twenty-first-century workplace.

Organizational Scripts, Inclusion, and Benevolent Sexism

Scholars have long recognized that storytelling and narrativizing can function as a central mechanism of organizational culture-building and professional identity development, particularly in terms of conveying a shared organizational history and trajectory (Smith & Keyton, 2001; Weick & Browning, 1986). More recently, Maclean et al. (2016) extended this insight by identifying and advocating on behalf of “historical organization studies,” which draw from historical cases and data to theorize about topics such as the establishment of narratives and other modes of sensemaking that animate organizations over time (p. 609). Part of this work involves identifying historical organizational moments and cases wherein a discursive template, or script, is established that emerges in and over subsequent times as “residue or sedimentation” shaping the organization and its subsidiaries as a contemporary whole (Suddaby et al., 2014, p. 113). Scripts along these lines, especially when they are set in motion by major companies and upheld by overarching regulatory agencies, have the potential to shape the trajectory of an entire professional field or institutional structure because they come to function as generic or expected and, therefore, as outside the scope of what might be in need of evaluation and revision. In this respect, the identification of historical, organizational scripts via a focus on central organizational discourses of the past can offer insight into problems that are so sedimented that they appear to be without cause or viable solution, such as that of sex-and-gender inequality and inequity in the contemporary workplace.

To be sure, the problem of exclusion and limited opportunity for advancement among women and those representing historically marginalized races and ethnicities in the workplace and professional organizations is one that has been studied extensively but has yet to be fully understood, despite extensive intervention at the level of organizational and governmental inclusion initiatives (Elias, 2020; Van Puyvelde, 2021). Some have argued that this may be because there has long been a lack of theoretical depth concerning how exclusivity according to sex-and-gender functions (Glick & Fiske, 1996). In a broad sense, sexism has been conceptualized in terms of attitudes and behaviors reflecting hostility toward, or discrimination against, women. Yet Glick and Fiske argued that this view fails to consider a significant and pervasive aspect of sexism: “the subjectively positive feelings toward women that often go hand in hand with sexist antipathy” (p. 491). Accordingly, they outlined a theory of ambivalent sexism that differentiates between two distinct forms of sexism: hostile and benevolent. While hostile sexism is characterized by antipathy and otherwise overtly “negative attitudes” toward women—particularly those women “who are seen as stepping out of their traditional gender roles”—benevolent sexism represents a more covert, ubiquitous, and socially-accepted form of sexism wherein women are characterized as naturally inferior and therefore in need of assistance, guidance, and protection by men (Fraser et al., 2015, p. 233). In terms of the latter form, women—even in professional environments—are “cherished and protected given their weak/fragile state,” and they are characterized as “unable to succeed in the workplace” without “the help of social policies” (p. 234). Ultimately, benevolent sexism relies on “the same restrictive and stereotyped ideas of gender” as hostile sexism, yet it presents them “in a superficially positive light” and therefore is generally more difficult to pinpoint or disrupt (p. 233).

Glick and Fiske’s (1996; 2001) differentiation between hostile and benevolent sexism helps to account for the contradictions evident in many inclusion initiatives between the explicit celebration of women as valued and capable workers and the lack of opportunities women have for professional success, advancement, and leadership. Often difficult to identify or measure, benevolent sexism appears superficially to promote gender equality while, in actuality, it “subtly undermines it by contributing to occupational gender segregation and leading to inaction in promoting women in positions in which they are underrepresented,” most commonly positions deemed more masculine such as those associated with specialized skills, management, or leadership (Hideg & Ferris, 2014, p. 706). Outcomes of benevolent sexism in the workplace include not only the exclusion of women from most leadership roles (Hideg & Shen, 2019), but also negative evaluations of women’s competence (Cassidy & Krendl, 2019), impaired cognitive performance among women employees (Dardenne et al., 2007), increased support from all employees for maintaining the status quo set by traditional gender roles (Jost & Kay, 2005), and the limitation of women’s opportunities in traditionally male-dominated fields (Gervais & Hillard, 2011). Moreover, and especially pertinent to the present study, is the finding that benevolent sexism is also associated with lowered STEM major intentions, STEM self-efficacy, and STEM grade point average in women (Kuchynka et al., 2018).

It would be easy to assume that because benevolent sexism is less outwardly antagonistic than hostile sexism, that it is also less harmful. Research suggests, however, that this is not necessarily the case. For instance, Fraser and colleagues’ (2015) investigation of the moderating effects of benevolent sexism demonstrated that, while benevolent sexism actually predicts support for (rather than opposition to) gender-based affirmative action, it simultaneously upholds a paternalistic ideology that deflects from that support. Women are generally characterized in this framework as less capable than men and “thereby needing extra assistance to enter the workplace” (p. 241). Their workplace achievements, then, are attributed to affirmative-action policies rather than women’s own competence, which fosters a cycle of sexist attitudes and practices that limit women’s professional development opportunities. Furthermore, benevolent sexism tends to be deeply internalized and is thus more likely to be sanctioned in the workplace by both male and female employees (Becker, 2010). Indeed, in the case of benevolent sexism specifically, women are more likely to “endorse the very ideology that maintains their subordinate position” (Fraser et al., 2015, p. 241). Because the protective paternalism granted through benevolent sexism extends only to those who conform to traditional, hierarchical gender roles, few opportunities for professional achievement are available either to women who uphold its tenets or those who resist its classificatory system of gendered employment.

Given this research on the pervasiveness and negative outcomes of benevolent sexism, the present study seeks to explicate how benevolent sexism has been communicated in historically influential—and therefore arguably agenda-setting—affirmative-action campaigns. We looked to Dow’s KMi74 campaign materials as a case study for helping answer this question because, for one, the central elements of—and criteria for—benevolent sexism emerged as an overarching finding from our initial, exploratory analysis. For another, not only was KMi74 one of the first internal campaigns of its kind, but also it was recognized publicly for the model of compliance and good practice it set in the early landscape of U.S. affirmative-action legislation (Committee on the Analysis of Executive Order 11246, 1982). That, along with Dow’s especially visible corporate identity then and now, situated the campaign to offer a historical organizational script for campaigns of this nature that followed in its wake. On the whole, this research extends Calder-Dawe’s (2015) exploration of hostile, “everyday” sexism in terms of its “choreography” and “organizing patterns” (p. 89), to the realm of top-down, benevolent sexism in the workplace. That is, the goal of the present work is to identify the means by which benevolent sexism in particular has been (and potentially still is) communicated so that those patterns can be more effectively identified, thwarted, and eliminated in contemporary organizational inclusion initiatives. Accordingly, the following research questions are posed:

RQ1: What were the identifiable rhetorical strategies of Dow’s KMi74 internal affirmative-action campaign?

Method

To answer these questions, the authors conducted a qualitative, textual analysis of the internal campaign materials. This involved, first, locating and procuring access to the KMi74 materials, which are not in public circulation. One of the study’s authors traveled to the Othmer Library of Chemical History Archives, located at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, PA, to view the “Advertisements from the Dow Chemical Historical Collection.” This archival collection includes over 900 items of material produced by the Dow Chemical Company from 1921 to 1993, including advertisements, leaflets, and internal campaign materials such as KMi74. With permission from the Othmer Library, the author photographed and digitized the KMi74 campaign documents, which consist of six large pamphlets and accompanying pull-out posters (25 pages in total) that were distributed and circulated within Dow over the course of 1974.

Second, the authors began their data analysis by engaging collectively in a close, exploratory examination of the 25 pages of KMi74 materials. All authors (seven in total) used qualitative, primary-cycle coding to guide their inquiry and develop an early codebook of overarching themes (Tracy, 2013). Considering group analytical discussions and emergent codes, the research team identified benevolent sexism as central to the messages communicated throughout the data. They reviewed Glick and Fiske’s (1996) theory of ambivalent sexism, wherein the benevolent sexism construct was initially explicated, as well as the growing body of literature published subsequently on benevolent sexism’s manifestations (e.g., Blumell et al., 2019; Glick & Fiske, 2018; Ramos et al., 2018). At this stage, two authors employed the theory of ambivalent sexism as a framework to guide subsequent iterative coding. This involved alternating between theoretical consideration of benevolent sexism in terms of its communication of support and celebration for women’s inclusion and advancement and its underlying exclusivity appeals (Fraser et al., 2015), and the emergent qualitative data (Tracy, 2013). They focused this comparative process on identifying the specific patterns of strategies and associated appeals evident in the data that seemed to uphold benevolent sexism’s conflicting contentions.

Third, the two coding authors discussed their secondary codes at length with the whole research team, resolving discrepancies through negotiation and consensus to create a final coding scheme. This meant identifying key patterns like Dow’s vagueness about affirmative action policy, definitions (or lack of definitions) of affirmative action, mentions of specific women as capable (over others, like secretarial staff), specific instances exemplified benevolent sexism (infantilization of women, comparison of men and women), and/or language reassuring men that women in the workplace won’t impact their jobs, etc. The authors worked both individually and as a group to identify specific examples from the data that exemplified the communicative mechanisms evident throughout the KMi74 materials. At this point, the data was encoded into NVivo 11 where phrases served as units of analysis. This process led to the formation of a comprehensive codebook, which guided the articulation of findings as they are presented subsequently. These findings are—first and foremost—the result of an iterative, team-oriented engagement with the data at hand.

Communicative Appeals in KMi74

Dow’s “Know More in ‘74” affirmative-action campaign was dedicated to explaining, justifying, and outwardly celebrating the growing (and government-mandated) presence of women within the organization. Exploratory examination of the campaign materials demonstrated that its message was conveyed via benevolent sexism, thereby maintaining the illusion of compliance and even change while nonetheless preserving key elements of the status quo (Glick & Fiske, 1996; 2018). In the following analysis, we find that benevolent sexism is upheld and communicated in three primary ways through the KMi74 campaign, including appeals to: (a) vagueness via generalization and absurdity, (b) circularity via redundancy and buzzwords, and (c) disingenuity via bait and switch argumentation.

Discussion

This study offers a close reading of the communicative infrastructure of one of the earliest, government-sanctioned, affirmative-action programs in the United States—Dow Chemical’s “Know More in ‘74” campaign. In analyzing the campaign’s six internal pamphlets and accompanying materials, we found that—despite its explicit celebration of women employees—the campaign functioned in subtle but consistent and powerful ways to maintain the company’s status quo via what Glick and Fiske (1996) theorized as benevolent sexism. Since the publication of Glick and Fiske’s initial research on this construct, scholarship has made clear the many harms of benevolent sexism, particularly in the workplace (e.g., Cassidy & Krendl, 2019; Gervais & Hillard, 2011; Hideg & Shen, 2019), but little has been established about the communicative means by which benevolent sexism is upheld. Thus, in this study we focused on identifying and explicating KMi74’s communicative patterns. In this discussion, we concentrate on reviewing these findings: (a) considering their possible manifestations in contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and (b) articulating some viable, communicative alternatives that may better uphold inclusivity and sex- and gender-based achievement in the twenty-first-century workplace.

The most pervasive communicative pattern that emerged from this analysis was that of vagueness wherein concrete details about Dow’s affirmative-action initiative were withheld, strategically obscured, or overlooked in favor of appeals to generalized values or attitudes. These types of generalizations provided the sense that change was happening or was about to happen at Dow by gesturing toward alterations in feelings or awareness but not toward changes in specific actions or behaviors. On one hand, this focus certainly had a lot to do with the strategic ambiguity built into the specific legislative terrain of the early 1970s. As Menand (2020) pointed out, when affirmative action was first developed, the authors “needed a flexible phrase because Kennedy’s committee was a bureaucratic entity with a vague mandate meant to signal the Administration’s commitment to fairness in employment” (p. 2). At the time, the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity had “no real enforcement mechanism,” Menard explained, “so ‘affirmative action’ was intended to communicate to firms that needed to integrate their workforce something like ‘Don’t just stand there. Do something.’ What they were supposed to do, aside from not discriminating, was unspecified” (p. 3). This lack of specificity, and lack of active enforcement, was mirrored in the vagueness of KMi74 via ambiguous statements, absurd, humorous, and out-of-place exemplars and illustrations, and repeated centering of awareness over any concrete action. On the whole, this content functioned to help change the subject when concrete information about the program was not provided and to devalue the program itself and the ideals it represented, that of opportunity, support, and investment in women as employees at Dow and as professionals more generally. It also functioned by taking up a great deal of space in the pamphlets, which gave the impression that content would be about affirmative-action policy change at Dow. Instead, however, the pamphlets provided only vague generalities and nonsensical directives.

In concert with appeals to vagueness, KMi74 was also communicated through appeals to circularity. This mode of fallacious, informal logic poses questions, both overt and implicit, and then answers them in ways that lead back to those same queries. In KMi74, this took the form of simplistic redundancy in most cases, but also in terms of repetition coupled with slight reframing. It also took the form of repeated inclusion of federally and culturally relevant buzzwords that were not coupled with definitions or explications but, instead, were defined only in terms of what had been stated in other pamphlets in the series. As in the campaign’s many appeals to vagueness, the campaign’s appeals to circularity functioned by bringing nothing new to the table. The campaign in an overarching sense, then, offered readers an insular, closed system, confusing enough to keep readers looking for answers but also frustrating to the point that the majority would give up searching before they realized that there was nothing to find.

Finally, KMi74 also upheld a framework of benevolent sexism by trading in appeals to disingenuity via bait and switch argumentation. Company employees and stakeholders were promised a future wherein women would help to progress the science that Dow oversaw and developed, but women ultimately came to be offered something different because the campaign framed them as a poor fit for upper-level, technical, and specialized opportunities. This framing involved infantilization wherein women were featured building with blocks and staring wide-eyed at each other rather than doing any type of specialized training, all the while professing how pleased they were to accomplish small tasks such as speaking in front of a group. Moreover, KMi74 implied repeatedly that those who supervise and otherwise oversee women employees at Dow are responsible for their advancement, rather than the women themselves. The benevolent sexism inherent to these appeals encouraged all campaign viewers regardless of sex or gender to perceive women as less capable than men and as in-need of significant assistance to enter or advance in the workplace. This communicative trifecta of vagueness, circularity, and disingenuity assured that Dow’s campaign lacked the argumentative warrants necessary for change, warrants related to women’s training opportunities, advancement and specific skills needed for employment in Dow’s technical positions, and the measures used to demonstrate the campaign’s success over time. While the campaign may have proved itself in compliance with federal regulations, even as an exemplar of such compliance, it was nonetheless not communicated so that its audiences would “know more” about much of anything.

Today, some 46 years after Dow’s initial affirmative-action campaign unfolded, there is some indication that the specific communicative patterns that KMi74 featured may have come to function as something of a historical, organization script for the communication of organizational inclusion campaigns to come, a script for maintaining the status quo of exclusivity and ensuring that mandated inclusivity initiatives are less than efficacious. For instance, Dow’s current online “Diversity and Inclusion” statement—which while not equivalent to the internal KMi74 campaign still allows for some comparison between past scripts and contemporary ones—reflects some of the same vagueness and circular reasoning evident in KMi74. On the front page of the “Diversity and Inclusion” website, Chief Human Resources Officer and Chief Inclusion Officer, Karen S. Carter, is quoted stating that “Inclusion & Diversity is a business imperative for Dow and is not only the right thing to do, but it’s the smart thing to do” (Dow, 2020). This statement mirrors “The Corporate Forest” (1974) pamphlet’s tautological assessment—it’s “business case” as Perriton (2009) identified it (p. 218)—that affirmative action is an inherently positive initiative because it “is good business” (“The Corporate Forest,” 1974, p. 2). The major (important) difference between the two is that this current iteration of the statement is attributed to Carter, a Black woman holding an executive position at Dow. And yet, although Carter’s attribution may seem to offer audiences proof that Dow values women’s advancement and leadership, this statement is located five pages back from the corporate home page, making it unlikely that most audiences will come upon it. This webpage highlights buzzwords and phrases that seem to lead back only to themselves, such as “equal opportunity” and even “inclusion” more generally. Similarly, it could also be argued that disingenuity appeals via bait and switch are identifiable in Dow’s current “Inclusion and Diversity” materials in that there is heavy reliance on the idea that leadership at the company is responsible for women’s and minorities’ successes. In this respect, both past and contemporary inclusivity appeals at Dow reveal that the presence of industry standard buzzwords and vague reasoning concerning diversity as it is “good for business” are not the same as transparency about policies for diversity and inclusion. As Ahmed (2012) explained:

Statements of commitment can thus be understood as opaque: it is not clear what they are doing if they are not doing what they are saying. A commitment [to diversity] does not necessarily commit the institution to anything or to doing anything. (p. 116)

Accordingly, Ahmed contended that ultimately, “commitment needs to be explained, even when a commitment has been made” (p. 118). Soundbites referring to diversity as simply “the smart thing to do” are not an explanation of policy or action on the part of the company. Continued research into the major communicative mechanisms upholding present-day inclusion programs along these lines is needed to provide a clear assessment and comparison with KMi74, particularly research into recent internal campaigns at Dow and other companies that align with KMi74’s function and focus.

Although it is beyond the scope of the current research to offer a rigorous analysis of contemporary indications of these specific modes of communicating benevolent sexism, it is important to note in the context of this historical research that, as Calder-Dawe (2015) explained, “sexism thrives in the present because it appears to dwell in the past” (p. 89). Indeed, it may be tempting to write off KMi74 and its communicative patterns as no more than a remnant of another age and therefore as less than instructive in the present moment. From the perspective of historical organization studies, however, this would be a mistake (Maclean et al., 2016), perhaps especially in this case where there is so much evidence that KMi74 was positioned in a number of ways to offer a discursive template or script for inclusivity initiatives that followed. We contend that the discursive sediments of KMi74 are likely not only evident in contemporary initiatives but are also playing a role in their longitudinal ineffectivity. Given this perspective, we identify some potential modes of resisting and ultimately replacing these communicative mechanisms, as well as the underlying scripts through which they are enacted, as they may be identified in contemporary inclusion campaigns. As all three of these appeals are grounded in argumentative fallacies related to (1) lack of specificity, (2) begging the question, and (3) failing to follow-through on promises made, it may be enough to get a resistive conversation started by identifying these fallacies and demanding details, evidence that differs from claims, and output that aligns with expectations. Certainly, the analysis at hand makes clear that those in position to design contemporary inclusion campaigns and initiatives must be sure to provide detailed information about how the program will work, which involves foregoing generalizations and humor in favor of specificities and a more serious take on the subject matter. They will need to forego and upend circular reasoning by including new, verifiable information by way of evidence for claims, and by clearly defining the terms and ideas that form the crux of the language on offer. Further, they will need to give their stakeholders what they promise, as opposed to a lesser version of what audiences were led to believe. This will require—again—very clear details about measuring success in the program and upholding inclusive standards and actions. All the while, they must also not forget that communication in and of itself, no matter what its modes are, is not enough to change any exclusive system within an organization. Other factors such as an infrastructure that supports effective mentoring (Buzzanell et al., 2015) and attention to “culturally constituted organizational perceptions of women and their leadership potential” (Dutta, 2018, p. 233) have been shown to be vital in making women’s success in the scientific workplace a reality. These factors must be championed in concert with attempts to upend the communication of benevolent sexism.

There are several limitations to the present research that are important to address. For one, Dow’s KMi74 campaign is just one early affirmative-action initiative. Although it was touted and upheld as a model for other such programs, it is not necessarily representative of all such campaigns at the time and is certainly not representative of all inclusion campaigns today. To more comprehensively explicate either the construct of benevolent sexism and/or its communication in the context of inclusion campaigns, future research must analyze other campaigns and instances wherein benevolent sexism was and is communicated. These efforts will no doubt unveil other communicative modes by which benevolent sexism is circulated and may, in some cases, find some overlap with the appeals identified in this specific case. The work of theorizing benevolent sexism in an attempt to thwart its power and force will require continued effort on this front and a range of different case studies, methodological tools, and theoretical approaches. We hope that the present analysis provides a useful springboard for research along these lines, one that may in some potential ways be tempered by the understanding that the theoretical explication of benevolent sexism occurred some years after the KMi74 campaign circulated at Dow. To that point, though, we would argue that the communicative processes that benevolent sexism involves were as evident in the 1970s as they were when benevolent sexism was finally recognized by scholars several decades later.

Another limitation of this research is that we did not garner access to the campaign’s “Rapback” pamphlet, which is previewed in the other pamphlets as a follow-up to the campaign proper. In fact, we have yet to confirm if the “Rapback” pamphlet was ever actually created or circulated because no information is provided about it in the Othmer Library collection or associated secondary literature. Should the “Rapback” pamphlet ever be located, an analysis of its promised “two-way conversation” between campaign creators and employees (“Know more in ’74,” 1974, p. 1) would offer some additional context to the response to and reception of KMi74.

Conclusion

On the whole, what our analysis demonstrates is that the specific communicative patterns at the heart of inclusion initiatives both past and present may play a central role in the realization (or not) of their goals, perhaps even more central than the explicit arguments pro-offered or promised by corporate and organizational authors. This study also contends that, because existing inclusion initiatives emerge from the discursive infrastructure of the movement’s founding in the 1970s, it is possible that they retain some of the counterproductive modes of appeal that were featured in those 1970s initiatives. As companies, businesses, and other organizations look to create a future where women, BIPOC, and members of other traditionally underrepresented and underserved communities are central players in skilled and leadership roles, they will need to ensure that their efforts avoid and resist the communicative patterns evident in KMi74, particularly because those patterns are some of the driving forces behind benevolent sexism in corporate, organizational contexts. The future of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs can be more effectively supported and achieved with a re-imagining of the scripts undergirding such programs historically.