Problem is that standards are across the board watered down so women can appear to make the grade. All across the board. Plus having certain numbers to be filled with women. Totally bad. It can’t be fixed without being dismantled.
You won't hear me disagreeing.
If a woman can do the job, fine. So we know if she can do the job, we need standards that reflect ability to do the job. I'm not sure I care about different standards on how many pushups a man and woman have to do — there is something to be said for minimal standards that every soldier must meet being gender-differentiated — but for the more physically intensive jobs, the standards need to reflect reality.
I know black female soldiers who couldn't get into the broadcast journalism part of PAO operations because they still had a hint of an ethnic accent — one which if I didn't know they were black, I might not have noticed. OK, that's the Army's choice. The result is the Army has standards that have the effect of keeping some blacks out of some career paths, when an ethnic accent that's not distracting may actually be an advantage for a civilian reporter in certain southern and urban markets. Apparently the Army wants higher standards for its communicators than the civilian media world.
So why can't we create a rule that women must be able to lift and carry a soldier with fully body armor a certain distance to be involved in certain types of operations? Seems to me that's much less discriminatory than the existing rules.
But then again, it's the Army — logic doesn't always apply. /sarc