Mallory Decker (PhD)
Imagine trying to land a helicopter on a ship in the middle of the night. It’s dark, so you wear night-vision goggles, narrowing your field of vision as if you’re looking through a straw.
For Mallory Decker, a doctoral candidate studying organizational behavior, this was part of her reality during the 11 years she spent as a naval helicopter pilot.
“That definitely was my least favorite part, flying at night,” she said. “It’s just kind of inherently scary.”
Decker deployed for about nine months to the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier. Despite how harrowing her job could be, she enjoyed flying and deployment.
“It’s like if you were on a sports team, and all you ever did was practice and never had a game,” she explained. “Deployment is like, ‘All right. Finally, I'm in the game. I'm doing the things that I trained for.’”
Of course, deployment came with some drawbacks. Decker recalled that toward the end of it, food supplies started to run low. She and the others onboard had to subsist on oatmeal and pasta. Due to its rarity, vanilla creamer was like currency, she laughed.
A Navy legacy
Decker’s ties to the Navy began in childhood. Her father, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, inspired her to attend the school.
“I liked the idea of how challenging it would be, not just in academics, but physically, mentally,” she said. “I was drawn to that, and then I was really hoping to make the same sort of close friendships that I'd seen my dad make.”
Decker graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and then embarked on a new venture: studying for a master’s degree in the United Kingdom. After obtaining her master’s in international and European politics from the University of Edinburgh, she owed at least five years of naval service.
When it came time to choose her discipline within the Navy, Decker was attracted not only to the prospect of flying but also to the aviation subculture, which she half-jokingly compared to Top Gun.
“Aviation, I think, is just a little bit more laid-back,” she said. “There are more rules about how much sleep you get, so you're a little bit better rested. Maybe that makes you a little bit happier. And then everybody loves to fly that goes to fly.”
“Deployment is like, ‘All right. Finally, I’m in the game. I’m doing the things that I trained for.’”
Mallory Decker (PhD candidate)
Working in a man’s world
Decker didn’t always envision herself as a researcher. By the time she left the Navy, her attitude had shifted. Expecting her first child, she knew that erratic shift schedules made staying in aviation out of the question.
In identifying a new field that would appeal to her as “a nerdy introvert who likes to read and write,” she landed on academia, realizing there was one subject she’d happily devote her life to: gender in the workplace.
While growing up, Decker never felt limited by her gender. During her naval deployment, she recalled feeling respected by the other pilots in her squadron, about a quarter of whom were also women. It was only toward the end of her military tenure, when she worked in the House of Representatives and then as a NATO aide-de-camp to a three-star British flag officer in 2017, that she first noticed gender disparity in the workplace.
“Some of my best girlfriends are also helicopter pilots,” she said. “On these lower levels, I was seeing women in these traditionally male-dominated spaces. And I'm like, ‘Yeah, women are here, what's the big deal?’ And then when I finally got up to these really high levels, it was like, ‘Oh, women are actually not here.’”
Decker stressed that she felt personally supported by her boss at NATO. But attending assemblies full of NATO leaders highlighted just how few women held high-ranking positions in the organization. Women were so outnumbered that she made a game out of counting them during assemblies. She would think to herself “There are more bald men in here than there are women,” noting that there were less than five women in a room of more than 100.
Life at Leeds
Decker’s experience in male-dominated workplaces informs her research passions. Some of her recent projects have focused on the gender pay gap, women working together in male-dominated industries and menopause’s impact on women leaders. The latter topic is the one she’s currently most excited about, partly because of the lack of knowledge about menopause and because of how much it varies from person to person.
“There are some women who have little to no symptoms,” she said. “And then there are other women who have symptoms for a decade that are debilitating or really interfere with their lives. There isn’t a standard menopause experience.”
Her next step in the doctoral program will be to propose her dissertation topic, which focuses on women’s relationships and identity in the workplace. Decker hopes her research will improve employees’ workplace experiences overall.
“We spend the majority of our lives at work, so I want to work toward making that experience better for everyone,” she said.