A long time ago--like in caveman days--a young engineer interned for a very large utility on the East coast that had bragging rights to running the 'safest' nuclear power generating plant around.
The intern's duty was to review the Quality Control procedures for the plant and see that they were in line with acceptable operating procedures at the time. The green and still wet-behind-the-ears engineer brought it up that randomly checking valves for safety would not guarantee that every valve was checked eventually and there should be a better system to ensure regularly checking all the valves since there was no way to predict which one would fail.
The feedback was not taken seriously because the intern was barely a sophomore, but it did garner the intern a lunch in the executive dining room. When the subject was casually mentioned the intern further indicated that while it made sense to have female operators avoid working around the live reactor, the male plant operators should be shielded when working in the plant while it was active; lunch was paletable and the view was great but then the intern was gently told that checking every valve is too costly and it was not called for by any protocol in place at the time and men don't carry all their reproductive cells around at the same time like women do so there was no such need for being overly cautious.
The intern moved on to remote sensing and communication; over a quarter century later the question remains--they're not still just randomly checking valves in nuclear reactors are they?!
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