Col. Lynette Arnhart steps down "to protect the integrity of the ongoing work on gender integration in the Army."

After Politico publishes the kind of internal memo that looks just awful to the general public.

She wrote:

"There is a general tendency to select nice looking women when we select a photo to go with an article (where the article does not reference a specific person). It might behoove us to select more average looking women for our comms strategy.... In general, ugly women are perceived as competent while pretty women are perceived as having used their looks to get ahead."

Maybe she really didn't deserve responsibility for PR, since she drew bad PR onto herself, but it's sad that such innocuous casual talk has so much effect these days.

By the way, I question the validity of the statement "ugly women are perceived as competent." I thought studies had shown that attractive people are perceived as competent. From Psychology Today:

A large number of experiments over the years have shown that, when asked to rate the intelligence or competence of unknown others, people tend to rate attractive others as more intelligent and competent than unattractive others.