I have no idea. Googling it gets "Grace Hopper Nanosecond Earrings."
FWIW, when I became STAR Student in high school, my mother bought me a necklace with a starfish on it to mark the occasion. She was looking for a "star" of some sort and the starfish was all she could find.
So maybe someone else bought them because of her rank and she wore them in part to honor that memory and that relationship-- family, friend, whatever. That's something people sometimes do.
Generally speaking in the Navy and Marine Corps we're discouraged from representing or using our rank to influence the public or gain favor. I don't go around calling myself by my rank, I'd expect a former Rear Admiral not to as well.
In the Marine Corps, honorably separated Marines are entitled to use their rank as a courtesy title in civilian life. Wearing jewelry to celebrate and pay homage to one's service is hardly influencing the public.
I've seen pendants with an EGA, spearheads, and whatnot but not insignia. I kind of diluted this thread by talking about rank instead of insignia at first. Very different things.
This is an astonishingly bad faith take. She was in the Navy. The Navy and the Marine Corps have explicit policies about not representing your rank or using your rank for influence or gaining favor. As I said in another thread, I don't walk around calling myself by my former rank and I'd expect such a highly ranked officer not to as well.
Before you edited your comments to say "my former rank," you listed a rank that in the Army would be too low to be a retiree. Granted, ranks are different in the Navy.
First, they do call her by her rank in the video.
Second, it's common in military culture for a retiree to be listed as [their rank] (RET) to indicate their Retired status.
Third, the video is from 1986. Policies and culture can and typically do change over the course of several decades.
If you served only a few years and did not reenlist, no, it's not appropriate to call yourself by your former rank. But retirees are free to use their rank so long as they don't misrepresent themselves as if they are still active duty, generally speaking.
The example I gave is wrong or rather, more pertinent to active duty when operating in a civilian capacity. The Navy and Marines are the only branches that have specific rules about that. Wearing your insignia as an earring is what I was addressing and that is still very taboo. I served under Mattis and I'd be floored if I saw him wearing four star bars in a suit.
That's a bit disingenuous, for a service that has been overwhelmingly male for centuries. I little like saying "Our club is completely fair and traditional, even though we don't have any women's bathrooms. Tradition!"
Remember this woman was an Admiral(?) and a groundbreaker. Maybe she made the tradition. Not a lot of Navy folk (publicly) wearing dresses before either.
That was my point, badly made. There were likely no traditions regarding menopause or menstruation before women joined for instance. There was a need to 'make tradition'.
Whether that applies to decorative dangly earrings worn during interviews, I suspect there was some part of tradition that was lacking clarity.
She was in the Navy. The Simpsons had a joke about Bart getting an earring to be all rebellious and his dad saying something about "You're disrespecting our proud Navy heritage."
Sailors have been known to wear earrings. I mean male sailors.
The only official earring I'm aware of that was actually written into a NavMC at some point was the Black Pearl for being the lone survivor of a ship wreck.
