NBC News reported on the new US Army non-gendered fitness testing standards:
The Army is developing a new, more grueling and complex fitness exam that adds dead lifts, power throws and other exercises designed to make soldiers more fit and ready for combat. “I am prepared to be utterly embarrassed,” Sampson said on a recent morning, two days before he was to take the test.
Commanders have complained in recent years that the soldiers they get out of basic training aren’t fit enough. Nearly half of the commanders surveyed last year said new troops coming into their units could not meet the physical demands of combat. Officials also say about 12 percent of soldiers at any one time cannot deploy because of injuries.
In addition, there has long been a sense among many senior officials that the existing fitness test does not adequately measure the physical attributes needed for the battlefield, said Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
The new test, “may be harder, but it is necessary,” Townsend said.
Reaching the new fitness levels will be challenging. Unlike the old fitness test, which graded soldiers differently based on age and gender, the new one will be far more physically demanding and will not adjust the passing scores for older or female soldiers.
This may be a case of a change that — on the surface — is all about equality, but will almost certainly work to reduce the number of women and older soldiers qualified for front-line combat duty. Which will not sit well with the non-military commentariat who will only see the drop in female participation and not necessarily the egalitarian reasons why.
This isn’t what we normally think of as an increase in justice and righteousness in society but it is indeed so – the US Army is to bias its fitness standards against women. It is going to do this by insisting that men and women be able to meet exactly the same standards. Obviously enough, in logic, demanding equal standards is not bias but that’s not the way that gender works in the current world. That fewer women pursue the top jobs and thus fewer get them is taken to be bias rather than that fewer so pursue. That there are fewer female engineers is apparently bias while the personal choices that lead to more female nurses is not.
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We’re a sexually dimorphic species, the male and female physiques differ. Of course, there are women who can pass high and strict fitness tests. But there are fewer of them than men at any particular standard. Which is why the older tests were gendered. Women had to meet a good standard for women, men for men.
So, now think of this from the viewpoint of the Army. Great societal pressure to open up all jobs to all and any gender. It might even be that’s righteous too. But that did mean that the tests for women concerning lifting and hauling had to be different. Otherwise there simply wouldn’t be enough women who could pass them to get to anything like equality.
