(no subject)

[winterbadger]

An excellent piece in Foreign Affairs on the indefensibility of maintaining a combat exclusion for women in the armed services.

Comments

[rubicat.livejournal.com]

One of the things that has always baffled me is the notion of gender for these sort of roles. The firefighter test, for example. Anyone - regardless of gender - should be able to haul a body down a flight of stairs and away from a burning building, right? So what would it matter whether that person is tall, short, male, or female? As long as the mechanics work, doesn't matter.

Same for combat. If a woman can pass the same test as a man, then why the hell not....

Needless to say, I do NOT agree with versioning tests to accommodate gender and ability, for these same reasons. But I think this is a universal perspective.

[winterbadger]

Well, I'm sure you get that the gendering of roles is a tradition that goes back to human prehistory. It's nearly universal--very few cultures have not had some version of it. A few have had reverse gendering, or no gendering, but not many that I'm aware of. While many women can perform many traditionally male roles, there's one role that only women can perform, and which they are more vulnerable while they are performing (for a curious mythical reversal of that vulnerability, see the legend of the Táin Bó Cúailnge--the Cattle Raid of Cooley). So women have traditionally been "protected" (whether they wanted to or not).

None of that, I agree, has any bearing on whether such gendering of roles should continue today. And I think the point that the article brings up, that you point out, is critical. Tests should be based on tasks; figure out what needs to be done and build a test to measure whether someone can do that, not whether they can perform the task in the way or tot eh level that a strong, fit, male can do it.