Is it just me, or did large portions of Kara Hadge's post not make sense?

"If the Senate confirms her nomination, Dunwoody will be the first woman to attain a status that historically has been achieved through combat jobs, which women are not allowed to hold. What's especially promising about her nomination is the fact that the government lifted its own barrier to recognize her achievements and capabilities by allowing her to circumvent the combat route."

Why is this something to be celebrated? If the military has decided that it has a good reason to reserve 4-star billets for combat officers, why is it a good thing that they changed the rules to allow a woman to advance to a 4th star? Isn't that sort of meaningless, political promotion? It would make a lot more sense if women could get their 4th star by the same route as the men -- coming up through the ranks as combat officers.

"According to the Times article, the percentage of women discharged from the Army last year under that policy increased from 35 percent to 46 percent, although females only make up 14 percent of the Army as a whole. How can women battle gender stereotypes to attain the top positions if many of them are being kicked out due to other types of discrimination?"

This misquotes the Times article, and is very misleading. The Times article does not say that 46% of women were discharged from the Army last year under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, it says that 46% of the "don't ask, don't tell" Army discharges were of women (implying 54% were of men). The 14% figure was cited to demonstrate that women are discharged at a higher rate under that policy than are men, since women make up only 14% of the Army but almost half of the "don't ask, don't tell" discharges. The statistics Hadge quoted say nothing about the absolute number of discharges. The Times article goes on to say that the Army discharged 302 soldiers under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy last year -- presumably that implies 139 women (46%) were discharged. Given that the active duty Army contains about 500,000 people, plus another 500,000 in the Reserves and National Guard (who I presume are also subject to "don't ask, don't tell"), then I can hardly agree with Hadge when she wonders, "How can women battle gender stereotypes to attain the top positions if many of them are being kicked out due to other types of discrimination?" It may be a stupid policy, and its effect may be to kick out a disproportionate percentage of homosexuals and maybe a disproportionate number of women, but I can't agree that a huge number of women are being kicked out because of this policy.

Now, an interesting set of statistics would be to break down each of the officer grades (especially the flag officer grades) by percentage women versus percentage of men for each service, normalized against the percentage of the women in the service as a whole within a particular range of years of service. Then you could better see whether there is a glass ceiling in the military, once you've removed factors such as the fact that there are less women in the military to begin with, and the fact that it's only relatively recently that women have been joining the military in large numbers (that is, the percentage of women with 20-30 years of service who are likely candidates for flag officer positions may be depleted relative to the percentage of women in the military as a whole).

Having grown up in the military and having served in the military I don't see how the don't ask don't tell policy could possibly be harder on women. It is SO much easier for two women to live the lifestyle they want as "roommates" than it is for men. No one questions women who live with and spend most of their time with a best friend, but people would raise eyebrows at men in the same circumstance. Also, it is pretty hard to get discharged under that policy unless you voluntarily ID yourself, so two women could feasibly stay roommates indefinitely.

Jen13:

Having grown up in the military and having served in the military I don't see how the don't ask don't tell policy could possibly be harder on women. It is SO much easier for two women to live the lifestyle they want as "roommates" than it is for men. No one questions women who live with and spend most of their time with a best friend, but people would raise eyebrows at men in the same circumstance. Also, it is pretty hard to get discharged under that policy unless you voluntarily ID yourself, so two women could feasibly stay roommates indefinitely.

I don't know, but there are a lot of factors that could contribute, if it is indeed true that women get discharged at a higher rate under "don't ask, don't tell" than do men. It could be that female-female relationships are harder to spot (although I don't know whether that's actually true), but when the are spotted, they are reported at a higher rate than are male-male relationships. Maybe female soldiers voluntarily identify themselves at higher rates (such as confessing more readily when asked or confronted). Maybe female-female relationships are prosecuted at a higher rate than male-male relationships, or the conviction rate is higher. Maybe the percentage of false convictions is higher. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe there is even a higher baseline incidence of female homosexuals in the military than there is of male homosexuals (perhaps the military is somewhat more attractive to lesbians than to gay men?), which could also result in an apparent higher discharge rate for lesbians if not accounted for.