On 6 December 2006, the Marine Corps lost its fourth female Marine to enemy action in Iraq. She was killed while supporting combat operations in the Al Anbar Province, and she became the 60th female of all of the United States military branches killed in Iraq combat operations. Unlike previous armed conflicts, the number of female military members killed in action suggests that the Marine Corps can no longer ignore that women are in all parts of today’s nonlinear battlefield. Regardless of combat exclusion laws designed to keep females off the combat edge of the battlefield, there is no longer a prescribed “frontline.” Women in various roles are subject to the same enemy as male counterparts. The proverbial “enemy” does not discriminate. Marines, regardless of gender, are targets of the Nation’s foes. For this reason, the Marine Corps should not continue to accept gender-based standards for the physical requirements of Marines. The Marine Corps should change the physical fitness test (PFT) standards for female Marines to incorporate a pullup requirement in order to promote increased military fitness in women, level promotion standards between both genders, and enhance unit cohesion.
I was required to read this article from the Marine Corps Gazette and write a one-page report on my opinion of it because I have boobs. Making this change will affect the entire Marine Corps, even the ones without boobs, so everyone should have been required to read it but who I am to say anything, I only have three stripes and no shiny stuff.
What follows is the report I submitted for my Commanding Officer, as ordered. It may suck because I typed it out in only about ten minutes but I think I got my point across:
——————————————————————-
First of all, I do think the author and those she quotes have a point: the flexed-arm hang as it is now is too easy. But to eliminate it completely will be a mistake for several reasons:
1. Requiring females to meet the same standards as males will drastically reduce the number of females in the Marine Corps. If that’s what you want, so be it.
2. The article makes it sound like the flexed-arm hang requires no energy, no strength, and no regular training to max it out on a PFT and that’s simply not true. If I don’t work on my arm strength, it becomes very difficult. Saying it’s possible for us to do pull-ups by comparing female Marines to professional female athletes is wrong. They spend all their time training their bodies and female Marines simply can’t do that in addition to military duties and having a life outside work. The amount of training we would have to do in order to do just one pull-up, much less three, will be all-consuming for most of us…and not worth it. And what about the males who can’t do a flexed-arm hang but can do pull-ups? Where does that fit into the picture?
3. Using an informal survey to support their argument is wrong. Self-selecting surveys like that are not representative samples of the population they want to know about. The article says at boot camp 53% of female recruits maxed out their strength tests but that survey said almost 80% did in the Fleet. So are we to believe that 30% of the females suddenly became that much stronger? What’s the real story on PFTs in the Marine Corps?
4. The major quoted at the end of the article says all Marines should be capable of recovering a wounded buddy or climbing a wall while fully loaded with gear. Sure, they should. But that’s an impossible dream unless you plan to make the entire Marine Corps look like the Silent Drill Team: all the same height, weight, and gender.
——————————————————————-
I didn’t have time to look up the study I’m about to talk about as I was writing the report but I knew I had seen it before. It backs up what I said about the amount of work required to get a female to complete a single pull-up: Training college-age women to perform the pull-up exercise
1. They just so happened to use a standard Marine Corps PT schedule: three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 50 minutes and specifically structured their training so it could be used by large groups of people. Like a platoon!
2. It lasted for 12 weeks, which also just so happens to be how long the Marine Corps’ boot camp is.
3. At the beginning, 2 out of the 20 women were able to do pull-ups. At the end, only 6 out of the remaining 19 women in the study were able to do any pull-ups and that includes the first two, who drastically increased their scores. (But still did not hit the male PFT max score) Two of the six only did one pull-up, which doesn’t count because you have to do three to pass the PFT.
So.
Right off the bat, you’re looking at immediately having an 80% drop in the number of females graduating boot camp. Then you’ll lose over 80% of all current female Marines, including, probably, virtually every single older female Marine. There isn’t any “age reduction” for pull-ups: It’s three until you retire. (as far as I know) So there goes all your female SNCOs and high-ranking officers.
But I’m willing to bet the numbers would drop even more because I believe you have to perform two pull-ups to even go to boot camp in the first place and only two of the 20 could. Yes, they could do training beforehand but not all recruiting offices have the time and not all poolees do either, since many of them would still be in high school. And how many would attempt a 12-week training program knowing they only had a 20% chance of succeeding?
Also, the structure of boot camp itself would have to change because we only PT’d three times a week for the first month! After that, it dropped to once, maybe twice, including occasional humps. In 12 weeks these women in the study probably did twice the training we do during 12 weeks of boot camp. And I won’t even get into the types of training we did versus what they did…theirs was geared towards pull-ups, ours wasn’t.
As for my last point, and the major’s…yes, in a fantasy land every single Marine could hop a wall in full gear and drag any of his buddies to safety. But unless you also plan to bar any men under a certain weight and any men over a certain weight from being in the Marine Corps, it won’t happen.
I do think they should change the flexed-arm hang. Instead allowing “any” bend in the arm to count towards your hang time, it should be changed having the time stop when our heads fall below the bar. That’s a lot harder than just keeping your elbows a smidgen away from being locked out for half the 70 second maximum and would force most of us to spend more time working on upper-body strength.
Go ahead, change the PFT to “pull-ups for all” if you want. But not if you want the 6% female Marine Corps to drop to a 1.2% or less female Marine Corps.
I am a female Marine currently in the Individual Ready Reserve. I like to sleep, travel, read, eat, explore, and take photographs. I read lots of news and I like reading about life in other countries. I am easily amused and my dream job is to be snoozing in a warm patch of sunlight, hopefully with a piece of tasty cheese nearby for when I wake up hungry.
Very intriguing. If find your argument to be very well thought out and logical. The gendered division of labor within the U.S. armed forces has always fascinated me. Many of the groups that I talk about in my blog such as the EZLN of Chiapas, Mexico allow women to fill any position in their ranks. In the ELZN, women consist of something like forty percent of the rank and file and thirty percent of the officer corps. Just something to think about.
Very well written, your points are taken. Women and menare different, period. Their bodies are designed differently and have natural tendencies to do certain things. So, in the end, if they want to get women out, so be it. Thats the way. We’ll be happy to have you in the Army.
If they go to twenty pullups, we’d be done for. I’ve trained as a bodybuilder, been in the Corps for nine years, and spent most of my time overseas doing nothing but trying to get pullups, and I max at 13. I’m with you on the bend in the arms thing… I think once the chin drops below, it’s done. Staying all the way up for 70 seconds is far from unrealistic. 20 pullups, however…
BTW, I’m a former Sgt currently a Lt at TBS… PT is changing in the Marine Corps, you’ll start to see the effects as us new Lts start hitting the fleet. It’s a good change, though… more combat conditioning, overall body strength, less silliness like running great distances in PT gear only.
Lt S
Pull Ups?
I’m far more interested in Show Ups. Whenever I read a comment in a blog somewhere referring to people in the Armed Forces, and asking “Where do we find such people?” I always answer:
“We don’t find them. They just show up.”
In the church shooting in CO recently two men “guards” had their guns drawn, but did nothing to stop the shooter. It was a woman guard who walked toward the shooter firing her weapon, and hitting the shooter, who then shot himself.
Who the f*** care how many pull ups she can do? She showed up, and took care of business.
Now, do I think the Marines should take pencil-armed weaklings? No. And, I think cardio fitness is VERY important, because fighting is hard work, and not being winded to the point of uselessness is a good thing, and will often decide who wins the fight. But, I’d take strength of character, will, and heart any day.
Bill Smith
Yes, your thinking is logical and also realistic, but I’m with Bill. I think character and heart are the strength of the military. There are both men and women in the military who don’t have either. There are far more that have more character and heart than would seem humanly possible. How many pull ups you can do is not the measure of a man or a woman.
My Dad, who passed away the day before Thanksgiving, was a proud former Marine. (Yes, I know because he told me many times “Once a Marine, always a Marine!”) The Corp gave him a send off reserved only for one of their own. My daughter is a Combat Medic in the Army and my son-in-law, also in the Army, is due to ship out downrange almost similtaneoulsly as the due date of their first child. I witness the sacrifices of friends and loved ones in the military, and those who wait for them at home, everyday. I say recognize the value that the diversity brings to the table. Recognize that men and women are different, and thank God that they are. Each has strengths and each has weaknesses, but together, that is where the strength lies.
To each and every one of you serving at home and abroad, and to all of the friends and family waiting at home-God bless you and keep you safe, especially during this holiday season! Thank you for your sacrifice. Peace on earth!
Um…not sure where I fall on this, but it does make for some good thought.
Man vs. Women Anatomy-good point.
Hopefully that isn’t the argument to say that we shouldn’t improve on our strength (male or female).
Interesting. And, they didn’t ask any men, cause we would all say GREAT IDEA…. without thinking it through, of course.
Another interesting aspect is what such upper-body intensive conditioning can do to many (though not all) women, and if they are denying certain aspects of motherhood and nurturing to those women, not to mention self-esteem in a way. I’m not saying having boobs is there is to being a female, but hey, if we get extra disability payments labeled as “trauma” after a mastectomy, due to the loss of self-condfidence and identity, that might be a side-bar in the upper-body conditioning question.
As you said, a small-framed man wouldn’t be able to carry his much larger, wounded buddy out of combat, and it would be unrealistic to descriminate against females specifically for not being able to do so. Our standards are different because our bodies are different, just the way that females aren’t allowed to be SEALs or SpecOps Officers but are allowed to be combat-trained SeaBees or nearly any other job within the Navy. There is more to combat than upper-body strength, and I doubt that when a male Marine, Airman, Soldier, or Sailor dies in combat they look at his PFT scores to see if he could have gotten behind a barrier sooner.
Our Medal of Honor awardees are not men who could do a lot of pull-ups. They are men who were willing to make significant sacrifices, knowing what they were up against, and in so doing usually saved many lives and sometimes lost their own. Was anyone questioning their PFT training methods at that point?
(In the Olympics, males and females still have different catagories, and even the most impressive female athletes in most sports often couldn’t compete equally against their male counterparts.)
Some standards may need to be made more strict, and some units may need to have more integrity in how they count during the test, but males and females do not need to be measured by the same standards.
Merry Christmas, well written the blog entirely, I agree with you on every aspect of the issue. From what it sounds like I don’t think the Major has to much expierience dragging wounded buddies to safety. I can asure you that pull-ups don’t help in that area. A PT test is just that a PT test a tool to measure ones physical fitness, out here though depending on your OPTEMPO you don’t really have a lot of time to actually PT, most of the exercise you get is from walking around all day with your gear on, up and down stairs, so on and so forth. It sounds more like the Major’s idea of recovering a casualty is the firemans carry or something ridiculous like that. The firemans carry is just that, for firemen. When it comes down to it proper training before and during your deployment is what saves the day, hence the old saying “Train as You Fight!” Semper Fi, Merry Christmas, and great blog!
I’m no training expert but have spent years in gyms all over the world and know the average female is weaker than the average male. Now you always have ones that are above average but the fact is God made us different for reasons and in marriage, business, or the Marine Corps you need both doing what they do best as a team. Thats my in a marriage when you become one flesh or in the millitary one team you are hard to defeat.
http://www.akiscb.blogspot.com
In any military task, you get the team assigned to you and you use whatever skill you possess to assign each individual those tasks which get the job done as expeditiously as possible. A good supervisor can spin gold out of straw. (A bad one looks for excuses…)
Physical fitness is a measureable thing….but is only a guide, one of several. I wish there was a similar way to measure “attitude”. A good “attitude” is way preferable and miles more important than a good physical fitness score.
I feel surveys like this one help to crush the good attitude out of people because nobody likes to feel that the deck is stacked against them from the get go.
I could give several stories and ancecdotal evidence from my 20 odd years in the military to back this contention up. As could many of the other commentators on this blog. However, I’ll just mention that the worst person that ever worked for me was always away on Squadron sponsored marathons and hockey tournaments (and good riddance), and the best person that ever worked for me was a 110 pound morale booster who could de-snag and repair a jet engine faster and more accurately than any other tradesman on the base. Both of whom come to think of it had boobs. Guess which one I would take with me on a recovery operation? And guess which one complained about not getting a recommendation for promotion?
I just wanted to say I appreciate you serving our country during this time. I know it may be hard to do at times but keep your head up. I enjoyed your blog as well. Keep blogging!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
This is probably one of the biggest arguments of our time in the Marine Corps. The desire of some to make the female PFT more difficult has NOTHING to do with making them more physically fit. If it does change, that is the excuse they will use. The main push to make the female PFT more difficult is to level the promotion playing field. Women can do the flexed arm hang better than men can do the pullups (generalization of course) so they typically score better on the PFT. This equates to a better composite score. This equates to faster promotions be it on meritorious boards or through the cutting score.
Of course, to the men I always say to buck up and get 20 pullups. Focus more on yourself than on others and your promotions will come. I do agree the flexed arm hang as it is now is too easy to be a measure of upper body strength. I like Akinoluna’s idea of making the chin stay above the bar. That will eliminate most of the women that never train for the flexed arm hang but still max it out (yes they do exist) not counting the ones blessed with a high fitness level.
As the Lt mentioned above, the USMC is changing their approach to PT (again). I saw a PPT on the new combat fitness test (or whatever it is called) and it is a little silly if you ask me. If anyone ever participated in football in high school get ready for cone drills again! :)
Mike~
Your last sentence said it all……
Isn’t it amazing how many stupid shits are out there???
I agree totally I am a male marine but in my field there is not alot of time to Pt and making females do pullups would indeed cost us alot of marines
Doing a single pullup is much harder than maxing the flexed arm hang. The navy allows both of these on CFA for girls going to the US Naval Academy. Many of the girls that end up at the USNA are able to do a few pullups, just because it helps their score. I’m headed to the Virginia Military Institute myself for Fall 2008. VMI has always had the same PT test standard for male and female cadets ever since women were first admitted. To pass, a cadet must be able to do 5 pullups, whether the cadet is male or female. 5 pullups are judged to be a “D-” (60%). An “A+” is 20 pullups. 90% of girls attending VMI are unable to do pullups when they first start at VMI, yet 100% are able to do at least 5 by the time they graduate.
~a female midshipman-to-be at VMI
How About “EQUAL WORK FOR EQUAL PAY”? where the hell does this fit in? If a male has to do pull ups to keep his job and that is what he has to do if he can not do pull ups he is booted out right? Well then why is it that for a female to keep her job that she does not have to do the same thing? Anywhere else this would be considered Sexual Descrimination!
Aki
I agree that making all Marines do pull-ups is unrealistic regardless if the decide a lower number for females to max out (kinda like the run). I do think that there needs to be a change as well as to how the arm-hang is scored. I like your idea of chin above bar as that is even more strict than my idea of stopping time when arms go past 90 degrees. It is too easy for a female to hang on for another 5, 10, 15, sometimes even more extra seconds and get the extra points.