Fight Like a Girl

it, and I led the female Marines and recruits at Fourth Battalion, I realized that they needed a strong leader to say, “No, failure isn't acceptable simply because you are women,” and, “I expect you to do better, because you ARE better.” I know now that certain language can suggest in an unconscious way that women aren't good at some things and shouldn't be expected to excel. I didn't learn until I got to Parris Island that there was a name for this: the Golem effect. The Golem effect is the idea that if you have low expectations for a group of people because of their race, gender, or ethnicity, they will underperform. In the end, failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I saw this firsthand when I tried to figure out why, for decades, the female recruits had achieved such miserable results on the rifle range:

Everyone knows that girls can't shoot.

Kate,

Let me know if you need anything. I think highly of you, and I know you set and hold Marines to a high standard—for the right reasons. I will gladly help you if I can, and I am happy to chat with you if you need someone to vent to.

S/F,

Brian

LtCol Brian P. Coyne, USMC [a peer CO on recruiting duty]

Commanding Officer

2d Bn, 3d Mar, 3d MARDIV

My peers gave me a hard time about not being able to focus on anything outside my own awesomeness, but here's a secret: We made obvious, easy changes at the recruiting station.

It shouldn't have been a big deal. I didn't see anything particularly “awesome” about it, but I was hoping presentations from my district could help everybody else. Stress levels were high; the suicide rate was up; recruit success was down. So, how do we fix those things? Well, we give people more time off, we make sure recruiters have time to take care of themselves, and we pay attention to the standards for new recruits. If we do it right, all of those things will work together.

While I was commanding officer on Recruiting Station San Diego, we changed the status quo—the way things had always been done. And that set off waves of bulldog hackles up and down the West Coast.

In the military, the response to an attempt at change is often, “But we've always done it that way.”

I don't believe the Marine Corps is different from most large companies in that respect. When you think about it, if companies had been operating outside the status quo, more women would be CEOs. Management would be more diverse. More products and services would be aimed at women and minorities. And, just as I experienced on recruiting station duty, making those changes would increase the companies’ success rates.

This shows up in so many obvious ways: Women, and especially minority women, are paid less. Women talk about making a choice between a career and a family, but—except in rare cases—men would never break down life that way. And women often rely on healthcare and services and products that are geared toward men, not women.

This plays out in doctor's offices; doctors believe that women's heart disease and men's heart disease are, in fact, completely different animals—that they're not even the same disease. Treating them the same could be killing women.

It can play out in seemingly small ways, too.

When I go to buy outdoor gear for my hikes along the Appalachian Trail with Joe, many packs don't fit my frame and my color choices are often limited to pink and purple. (Okay, so I happen to love pink, but still…) But think about the woman who likes to fish or hunt, or who works as a firefighter or a service member, and think about the gear limitations. Female service members will tell you that body armor chafes chins, digs into hipbones, and sticks out an inch or two from the body, rubbing against that soft spot on the back of the arm. We manage, but it's not built for us.

Not only is there an obvious fix, but some genius will make a mint marketing toward an already-existing crowd. (Some already are: Outside magazine devoted its April 2017 issue entirely to female athletes supported by advertisers marketing women's gear.¹)

And female CEOs? In 2015, Quantopian found that female CEOs in the Fortune 1000 helmed companies with three times the returns of companies led by men.²

I suspect that more women in leading roles would also translate to a Marine Corps inspired to new ways of thinking about how to do things.

When I got to my recruiting station in San Diego in June 2007, we used data and analysis to determine if “the way things have always been done” was the best approach. This may or may not surprise you: It was not.

I was excited to take over.

I had been on recruiting duty once before, as one of the first women to be assigned as an operations officer, oddly enough. Basically, that meant that I was in charge of making sure we were on track to make our monthly enlistment and shipping missions for kids (the majority are seventeen years old when they sign up, and then turn eighteen before they graduate from high school and ship off) to go train at boot camp. It's similar to what operations officers do in the civilian world. I didn't know at the time that it was some big deal for a woman to do it, because it just seemed like something anyone could do.

I also learned I wasn't that bad at math, despite hating flash cards as a kid.

At my first job in recruiting, I found I enjoyed collecting data and filtering through it with a stubby pencil to identify trends and warning signs. That experience helped tremendously when I got to San Diego. Most of the recruiters at San Diego were male Marines, of course—it doesn't take a math whiz to figure out those odds. Two male officers worked for me at