“I've never had this problem,” she told me. “I don't believe any bias exists.”
I told her that was fine, but I was showing them in black and white the test results of men and women compared through of years of training.
“If you can show me that your way is better, we can do it your way,” I told her. “But you have to show me.”
I'm still waiting.
So, what did the recruits think about the changes?
Heh.
The recruits didn't know any better. Recruits arrive at boot camp as blank slates never having faced anything like the training they receive at Parris Island. So, they only know what they're taught. I know that sounds like common sense, but sometimes you forget that they don't know what status quo looks like.
The recruits needed to know only that I expected them to max the fitness test and fire expert on the range so they could compete with their male counterparts.
Easy-peasy.
I started thinking about why military women—whether officers, enlisted service members, recruits—had such low expectations of themselves. You would think that women who join the Marine Corps wouldn't be benchwarmers. Ideally, they are women with some taste for adventure, some capacity for risk, and some need to prove themselves. So why, when they finally had the opportunity to prove themselves, would they settle for the bare minimum?
We can blame the men all day long for holding us back, but we're still letting them hold us back. We're 51 percent of the population. It sure seems as if we should be able to recognize in ourselves and in each other what we're capable of and what we're worth—from equal pay to equal numbers of expert qualifications at the rifle range.
In 2014–2015, the timing seemed good to change things at Fourth Battalion. We were starting to see some civilian advertisements and marketing aimed at women—at strong women. That whole thing about a missed market in sports equipment and fitness clothes? People were starting to think about it. And companies that traditionally marketed to women, like the manufacturers of lipstick and tampons and dresses? They too have finally started picking up on this need to be recognized as both strong and beautiful.
Part of the change in popular opinion about women comes from sports: Soccer heroes and ballet heroes, like Mia Hamm and Misty Copeland, have emerged as marketing forces, with women responding to commercials featuring muscles as objects of beauty.
And part of this change comes from us: Women who have been serving in large numbers in war for the past fifteen years. We've seen women who show up on the screen in body armor and carrying weapons, or women who earn awards for dragging men to safety and treating their injuries, or women who run for Congress after serving, one after losing both legs when the helicopter she piloted was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, so the image of ourselves should be fierce.
Of course we're strong.
So when did it become an insult to train like a girl?
You still hear it—on football fields from fathers with sons, and on the training field from drill instructors with male recruits: C'mon, ladies, get it together. You look like a bunch of women. You throw like a girl. My drill instructors and I regularly heard these things, and, worse, yelled to the male recruits when they came in last on a run or showed the least bit of emotion.
This brings to mind that brilliant Super Bowl commercial, “Run Like a Girl,” which was created by the brand Always. In that commercial, adult women were asked to demonstrate how to run like a girl. They did: arms flailing, giggling, legs at odd angles. When asked the same question, a bunch of little girls ran as fast and as hard as they could. They did this with no expectation that they should do anything but their best. They ran to win.
My recruits should have embodied that expectation as well. They had joined the Marine Corps. They had to have some idea of what that meant, some personal goal or need to be the strongest of women.
Instead, in the Marine Corps, we separated the women, talked about them as being part of the “Fourth Dimension,” and told them that their bodies aren't appropriate for shooting weapons.
This was no meritocracy based on abilities. This was an organization that held women back, based on the institution's misguided expectations of them, starting with Marine recruiters. Generally speaking, the recruiters didn't expect their female applicants to show up for physical-fitness training before boot camp; the women didn't hold leadership positions in the poolee platoons; and, worse, female recruits were allowed to ship to boot camp having made no progress at all in terms of their mental and physical preparation.
We expected nothing of them.
Just as an aside, the first Marine Corps commercial to spotlight a female Marine aired in 2017, and only after the Marines United naked-photo-sharing scandal broke in the news and caused the Marine Corps a ton of embarrassment. Most Marines think it was only released as a PR stunt to try to win back public favor.
By the time male recruits arrived at Parris Island, their expectations of female recruits were already low, as a result of the double standards they witnessed in their recruiting offices. At boot camp, they rarely saw the women—just at church on Sundays and for some training in large classrooms where they weren't allowed to interact—so there was this mystery about how female Marines are made, and even a pervasive idea that they do less than their male counterparts.
Women do follow the same training schedule
