Fight Like a Girl

and expectations for male and female recruits. The Marine Corps has long justified segregated boot camp by saying that separation is the only way to instill confidence in women. I believe that confidence can only come by helping a person achieve higher results than she ever thought she could—just as we expect from our male recruits. It might be different if the Marine Corps had never held women to lower standards in training because of assumptions about gender. If, for example, they had maintained segregated training and produced results on par with those of the male recruits, it would be harder to argue that segregation was bad. But forty years of recruit graduation scores don't lie. This data is collected and maintained by the regimental operations section, so it isn't as though the scores are not readily available for comparison and analysis by the regimental CO. I wanted people—the media and members of Congress—to start asking the Marine Corps hard questions about its recruiting and training methods for women.

During my year at Parris Island, my Marines had shown the Marine Corps that women were capable of achieving better results than anyone had ever thought possible. I wanted the public to know that women could keep up with men, both on the rifle range and on the PT field, as long as we expect them to do so. In other words, all of the Marine leaders who espoused the idea that the female form is inherently limiting were wrong.

And it was a critical time to get the message out to the public about why the Marine Corps couldn't afford to maintain the status quo for how it recruited and trained women. Just a few months after I was relieved, the secretary of defense announced his intention to open up all jobs and units to women, including the infantry. Truth be told, I was originally not a fan of women in the infantry. When I first got to Parris Island, I harbored doubts that we would ever be able to find women who were capable of doing the job, because I knew the Marine Corps had historically not focused on recruiting physically fit women and then training them to high standards.

But after we implemented our action plan to improve the performance of our female recruits, I quickly realized that when women were held to higher expectations, they could keep up with their male counterparts. My thinking on women in the infantry changed when I realized that we would arbitrarily limit the talent pool if, simply because of their gender, we denied the opportunity to women who were capable of doing the job. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that allowing women to serve in the infantry—the most exclusively male club in the Marine Corps—would help eliminate negative stereotypes about women and reshape the culture. Joe and I knew that the media could help us shape public opinion on the issue, and so we constantly stressed the need to change the status quo for female recruits and Marines.

In the beginning, I was anxious about engaging with the media, particularly because I still had a year to go on active duty. But it didn't take long for me to realize that the worst had already happened. The Marine Corps had fully expected me to leave Parris Island cowering and ashamed, and I think I shocked the leadership when I began to fight back. My own confidence grew as the summer days turned into fall, and I began to receive more and more emails from men and women—both military and civilian—expressing their support for what I was trying to do. I was finding my voice.

After I returned home, I also continued to use all possible avenues to draw attention to the unjust manner in which I believed I had been relieved of command. But although I still believed that justice was possible, as September turned into October and then fall turned into winter, I recognized that if I was going to see my reputation restored, it was not going to come through official Department of Defense channels.

I tried submitting a request for an investigation into my relief as reprisal through the Department of Defense inspector general, or IG. By the IG's own definition, “Reprisal happens when a management official takes (or, under certain statutes, threatens to take) an unfavorable personnel action against an individual, or withholds (or, under certain statutes, threatens to withhold) a favorable personnel action, because that individual made or was thought to have made a protected communication or disclosure.”² In my request to the IG, I explained that I had been fired as a form of retaliation for making allegations of a hostile work environment and gender bias.

I knew that the criteria for substantiating reprisal through the IG is extremely narrow, and it can be difficult to prove, even with extensive documentation, which I had. In fact, I learned that IG investigators substantiate less than 11 percent of all reprisal cases each year. Although these are fairly overwhelming odds, I was hopeful that an impartial investigator would see the injustice in the way I had been fired.

I carefully and thoroughly laid out my case, explaining that the Marine Corps had failed to conduct the equal-opportunity and command investigations by the book. I also explained that, because General Williams and his officers knew I had requested mast before the investigations were conducted, my relief represented reprisal.

When I finally received a final copy of the IG investigation, I found out a little more about what Colonel Haas had been thinking.

Those emails I sent to recruiting-station commanders? The ones on which I had copied Colonel Haas? He told investigators that he had counseled me that they were “counter-productive to the relationship he worked to build with the recruiting force.”³ He said he told me my emails were critical and not helpful, and that he told me to stop sending them. As I've already made clear, he did not say this to