Question My understanding is that, to enter the military, men and women must satisfy different basic physical standards. Women need not do as many push-ups, do as many sit-ups, run as fast, etc. The goal, I imagine, of these separate standards is to allow women -- who tend to be physically weaker -- to enter the military by expending the same effort (if not producing the same results) as men. My question, then, regards the man who is unable to pass the "man test" but can pass the "woman test." He is as physically capable as many of the women being admitted and, yet, simply by virtue of his gender, he is denied admission. Isn't this overtly sexist? Moreover, if the military thinks that there is some baseline minimum physical capability that every person ought to possess -- i.e., the capability for which they hold female applicants responsible -- then shouldn't anyone with that capability be allowed in? Surely, if the situation were reversed -- if women had to pass some artificially inflated test that attempted to "level the playing field" for men -- the uproar would be deafening.

Accepted:
November 2, 2006

Comments

I agree with the thrust of your comments -- that there should be uniform physical requirements for anyone who wishes to serve in the military, and these requirements should be based on the physical demands of the jobs recruits will be required to do. But it's this second proposition that should engage our attention. What are the physical demands of a military career? Modern warfare is highly mechanized; that means both that a great many combat roles will not require much in the way of brute physical strength, and that many will require specialized knowledge and mental skills. There are, in short, no uniform physical requirements for serving in "today's army." So it may well be that the relaxed physical standards for women result in no loss of combat readiness whatsoever. In that case, the relaxed standards ought to be the norm for everyone, with more demanding standards imposed only for those who wish to serve in the more physically demanding roles. My guess is that the sexism involved in all this is in the maintenance of gratuitiously high physical standards for men -- the expression of tired old machismo. The obvious thing to do would be to pull out the people with high degrees of upper-body strength and make them the grunts who have to march with body armor and packs, while giving the driving, piloting, and high-tech jobs to the physically weaker people. But you won't see that happening because there are too many high-status jobs in the military that make minimal physical demands, and you can't have women clustered in the high-status positions.

It should be noted, by way of figuring out why things are as they are, that the US military is constantly revising its enlistment requirements, for reasons of political expediency (demands for more opportunities for women in the military) surely, but also in order to get the bodies they need. Without a draft, and with no end in sight to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has been quietly relaxing standards regarding educational attainment and criminal activity in order to meet its recruitment goals. (See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15197832/ for details.)