There are days when nearly every female professional sighs about how it is a man’s world out there. Glass ceiling, employment limit or closed door – call it what you will, but gender-neutral workplaces are not common everywhere in the world.
Even at the ongoing World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, only 17% of delegates are women.
This week, the US Army has thrown open the gates to at least 237,000 jobs previously barred to women, mostly in combat fields. The historic change in policy signed by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Thursday, will allow women to apply initially as combat engineers and field artillery officers.
A decade of US involvement in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has shifted the American policy towards permitting women to serve on combat duty. More than 280,000 women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, and 152 of them have died.
Other countries have been quicker to integrate women in combat roles. Israel, Germany and Canada are among the nations that already have servicewomen in combat. Australia, France and New Zealand also allow women in combat.
The move has been met with widespread praise in the United States, with the US Army seen as having somehow acknowledged that women are not inferior in any way to its male staff. However, there are also concerns about occupational hazards and the fraternisation between male and female officers that may obstruct their call of duty.
Women going into combat will have to, for instance, meet the same physical standards as men for certain posts, and it is still not clear if the authorities will be able to create a gender-neutral criterion that can be maintained without controversy.
All US armed services will have to submit a plan for how they will study incorporating women into combat by May 15. The implementation must be finalised by January 1, 2016.
The lifting of the barrier on women may also help the US Department of Defence improve its image, and perhaps lessen the frequency of sexual assaults throughout the military.
Male aggression may indeed be an advantage in combat, but it also leads to more accidents, injuries and suicides. The womanly capacity for nurturing – especially in its most basic form, motherhood – leads to 58% of hospitalisations among active-duty female soldiers. But they also have a lower rate of injury and accidents. Will the new development change this figure?
But it doesn’t take a gender relations expert to notice that men and women behave differently in peacetime. It’s quite likely that they’ll be different in combat as well.
The current climate of warfare seems to require an asexual soldier totally programmed to follow orders while marching on a meagre diet. Since such an ideal doesn’t exist, the US will have to start looking at shattering the “brass ceiling”.