So I will.
In some ways, I can't help it. My relief, and the injustice of it, follow me everywhere I go. My experience dealing with gender bias and sexism on Parris Island pushed me to be more interested in women's issues. I read and do research constantly, send emails to people who can help me better understand what happened and how we can fix it, and write editorials for newspapers when I see issues that should be addressed—or women to be proud of. For example, Joe and I just co-wrote a column—See? Gender-integration!—about the first female Marine Corps officer to graduate from infantry school.5 The Marines have decided not to name her or track her progress. But we are trying to put her in the spotlight.
Why? Two reasons:
(1) We want other female Marines to watch and learn and cheer.
(2) We want the public to know about it, to make sure the Marines treat her fairly.
There's also some irony: For a year after I retired, I worked as chief operating officer for the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN), the only nonprofit in the United States entirely focused on supporting the needs of and advocating for the rights of service women and women veterans. Sexual harassment and assault were big issues for us, but everything else I learned at Parris Island also came into play on a daily basis with my work at SWAN.
I've talked about gender integration on Capitol Hill, and I've talked about the hyper-masculine culture of the Marine Corps and how we lay the foundation for sexism and gender bias at Parris Island in segregated boot camp. Representatives and senators are finally asking when the Marine Corps intends to integrate boot camp and change the culture of the service to level the playing field for women.
For instance, when General Neller appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the Marines United scandal, he tried to tell Senator Elizabeth Warren that boot camp was integrated because men and women are within five hundred yards of each other, training at the same time.6
She and several other senators on the committee fought back and grilled the crap out of him. He then sidestepped the question by repeating himself: He said that male and female recruits perform the same activities while in the same area of the base, and, therefore, they were integrated.
Although the hearing ended and boot camp still isn't integrated, it feels good to know that folks on the Hill and people in the non-military world (and actually quite a few in the military world) get it. They know separate is not equal. After all, the benevolent sexism and gender bias women experience every day in the Marine Corps is exactly the same as what women face in the corporate sector.
I have come into contact with two networks of women, mostly from the Army and Air Force, and I've learned that, to a certain degree, gender bias exists in all of the services. But it is incredibly pervasive in the Marine Corps, in great part because we pride ourselves on being tough as nails so we can serve as the first responder for the nation when the stuff hits the fan. By maintaining segregated boot camp, because it is allegedly the only way to create confidence in female recruits, from the start, we create a negative perception about women not being as strong or tough as their male counterparts. And by separating the women in training, the men don't see the female recruits pushing themselves past their perceived limits. All that the male Marines and recruits know is that the women have to train separately because they can't mentally handle training with their male counterparts. We teach the men from the second they arrive at Parris Island that the women are inherently frail. Imagine the impact this has on the culture. The Marine Corps culture shapes who we are and what we do. But if all of our heroes are men, most of them white, and most of them from the conservative Bible belt, there isn't a place for women. The myth that only men can be warriors on the battlefield exists partly because we don't celebrate the victories and contributions of female Marines in combat situations.
That comes, in part, because there aren't enough women in the Marines to begin with. Many male Marines go their whole careers never having worked with women, because, let's face it, with a population of just 9 percent for the entire force, the women are spread thin throughout the entire organization.
Of all the services, I think the Marine Corps has the hardest time overcoming institutionalized bias, in large part because we are so tied to our history that we end up confusing “the way we have always done it” with tradition. And for a Marine, it is tantamount to sacrilege to buck tradition. The Marine Corps has always been the service most resistant to change, as evidenced by the service's reluctance to integrate African Americans into regular units or when it fought against lifting the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” ban on gay men and women in the military.
You want to talk about resistance? It was especially evident in the lead-up to integrating ground-combat jobs and units.
Despite the existence of studies from academic organizations like RAND indicating that the integration of women into ground combat would not cause cohesion problems, the Marine Corps insisted that allowing women into these new fields would pose a risk to the service's ability to win battles.7 It was interesting to see how Marine spokespeople cherry-picked items from their Integrated Ground Task Force experiment to support the idea that women physically are not capable of ground-combat jobs, while glossing over other portions of the study that supported how integration would actually improve the force.
Having seen the lowered expectations for female recruits firsthand at Parris Island, I was also struck by the fact that the women who participated in the Marine Corps study were recent graduates of Fourth Battalion. I knew that
