Hard to say with what we know now. As far as I have heard, the standards have not been lowered.
Lowering standards frequently leads to disasters. The female Navy pilot quite a few years back splashed and sank on a carrier landing. Word went around that she had been recycled until they could pencil whip a pass in flight training and that she was an incompetent pilot. All because she was part of the first class of women pilots.
In the AF I flew on and ABNCP with one of the first AF female pilots. She was an abomination who scared one too many general officers and lied about an incident to another. She still flew for qual but was made the safety officer (ironic). She was also nuttier than Mr. Peanut.
I had a similar conversation with an Air Force major at the AF Academy in 1975 - the year before they admitted the first class with women. We were bombarded by commissioned officers conducting surveys and opinion polls of cadets. The major in question asked me what I thought of lowering the PT standards, to which I replied, “The Air force tells us they can do anything we can do, so why lower the standards?” No reply...
The female navy pilot you mention was Kara Hultgreen. First female fighter pilot in the navy. She died within a few months of completing her carrier qualifications after making two serious mistakes attempting to land her F-14.
LT Kara Hultgreen was the first USN female fighter pilot qualified in the F-14A Tomcat. Hultgreen had a mediocre training record, but was flagged as the leader in the fighter pilot derby. In addition, Hultgreen was not a safe pilot, because she'd had five Class A accidents [where the aircraft is seriously damaged or destroyed]. A male officer would have had his flight status pulled after two, but Hultgreen was allowed five.
On 25 October 1994, Hultgreen was killed when her F-14A, crashed on approach to USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) off the coast of San Diego after a routine training mission.
Finding herself overshooting the landing area centerline, Hultgreen attempted to correct her approach by applying left rudder pedal which caused the nose to disrupt the airflow over the left (inside) wing as well as the airflow to the left engine intake. (The Approach Turn Stall, aerodynamic effect and the appropriate recovery technique were taught throughout the period that Hultgreen completed primary [undergraduate] flight training.) The left-hand engine suffered a compressor stall and lost power -- a well-known deficiency characteristic of the F-14A's TF30 engine when inlet air was no longer flowing straight into it. The F-14 NATOPS flight manual warned against excess yaw for this reason. Loss of an F-14 engine results in asymmetric thrust, which can exceed rudder authority, especially at low speeds.
After aborting the approach, Hultgreen selected full afterburner on the remaining engine, causing an even greater asymmetry. This, combined with a high angle of attack, caused an unrecoverable approach turn stall and rapid wing drop to the left. The radar intercept officer (RIO) in the rear seat, LT Matthew Klemish, initiated ejection for himself and Hultgreen as soon as it was apparent that the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable. First in the automated ejection sequence, the RIO survived. However, by the time Hultgreen's seat fired 0.4 seconds later, the plane had rolled past the horizontal and she was ejected downward into the water. She was killed instantly. The entire event unfolded in less than 20 seconds.
There was a book a while back about the USN rag squadron that trained Hornet pilots: “Bogeys and Bandits: The Making of a Fighter Pilot”.
In it, they had a few female pilots, and one of them was a real piece of work. She wasn’t beyond accusing the trainers and the Navy of sexual harassment and discrimination to cover up her rather severe deficiencies.
It was pretty scary to read. I will say, one had to feel a bit of sympathy for the other female pilot in with her, who seemed to simply want to absorb the training and lessons, learn from them, and do her job, and she was concerned that she would be viewed the same way as the problematic one.