Women in the Military
How can women best help support national security objectives?
Women are increasingly represented in the military. This has been an ongoing transition for quite some time now and many women have proved very capable in a military context. At this point, it is well established that women can have a positive impact on military operation from a support capacity. Where opinions diverge is generally in regards to women in the special forces and women in the direct combat infantry.
I would like to draw attention to two interesting videos on this topic:
- Firstly, a video on the topic of a research study that compared the performance of women and men fighting side by side. It found that men performed better and got hurt less often. The all men units were faster in tactical movement, had better accuracy, registered more hits on target and had an overall noticeable difference in performance compared to mixed groups with both men and women.
- The second video is an interview with a woman from the marine corps who discuss why she thinks that women would serve military operations better from a support capacity than through direct combat. The main arguments are that, men are stronger, they are faster and that integrating women would lead to higher costs and challenges with meeting medical needs in the field. She believes that women can do the most good in a supportive function and that they still have great opportunities for promotion even if they don’t have direct combat experience.
To summarize, it is clear that women can support combat operations through various functions and can also be successful in higher positions of leadership in the military organization. However, the evidence to date indicates that including women in direct combat operations lowers operations performance, accuracy, speed, efficiency and increase costs.
Sincerely,
Bright Blue Dot
This article was published in the publication “Gender Analysis”. It is a publication striving to publish well researched articles on the topic of gender. If you liked this article you might enjoy following the publication.
