The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man. Ivy had failed, in the eyes of the Russians and of many in the NASA hierarchy, by not taking a firmer hand with Sean Probst. That wasn’t the only complaint they had about her, but it was the one around which everything else had crystallized. Once everyone had begun to see her as the overly book-smart, well-meaning but weak-kneed technocrat, everything she did had been viewed through that lens.
