Sexist 'Armchair Admirals' Criticized After NZ Navy Sinking

New Zealand's defense minister says the cause of the country's first naval loss since World War II is being investigated—but "one thing that we already know did not cause it is the gender of the ship's captain." Defense Minister Judith Collins said Thursday that she's appalled that Cmdr. Yvonne Gray is facing online abuse from "armchair admirals, people who will never have to make decisions [that] mean life or death for their subordinates," the BBC reports. Collins said the "deeply concerning misogynistic narrative" has led to women in uniform "being abused in the street," per the Sydney Morning Herald. At the same press conference, the country's naval chief, Rear Adm. Garin Golding, called the abuse "disgusting."

Gray, who moved to New Zealand in 2012 after 19 years in Britain's Royal Navy, oversaw the evacuation of 75 crew members after the HMNZS Manawanui hit a reef in Samoan waters on Sunday morning. She told the New Zealand Herald earlier this week that after her "very worst imagining became a reality" and she gave the order to abandon ship, the crew "responded in exactly the way I needed them to," with "commitment, with comradeship, and, above all, with courage." She'd been in command of the Manawanui, a surveying ship, since 2022. It ran aground amid rough seas in an area that hadn't been surveyed since 1987.

Cmdr. Tom Sharpe, a former Royal Navy officer, says much of the commentary around the sinking appears to be based on "misogyny rather than hard-earned sea time." Sharpe was in command of a similar ship, the HMS Endurance, when it almost sank in 2008. It appears that Gray "made an early and brave call based on the inevitability of the situation, and then managed the evacuation well," he writes at the Telegraph. "The act of abandoning is perilous itself," he writes. "Most evacuation systems only work up to a certain sea state. Then do it in the dark, in terrible weather and into rubber lifeboats with no engines, surrounded by the very reefs that you've just struck, and the Manawanui's company did well to not have any major injuries or fatalities." (More New Zealand stories.)