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Home » Fitness » New concerns that lower fitness standards fuel disrespect for women – Marine Corps Times

The Marine Corps' longstanding tradition of having two-tiered fitness requirements for men and women aims to ensure fairness, but a growing chorus of critics say it creates a double standard and implies that female Marines are not as physically capable as men.

Its another political battle inside the Corps over gender and standards that stems in part from last years controversial decision to allow women to serve in combat units traditionally restricted to men.

The Marines recently began imposing gender neutral physical requirements for specific jobs, a move designed to moot concerns that physical standards will suffer as women integrate into combat units. Men and women in combat arms career fields must meet the exact same benchmarks.

When individuals start out at the recruiting station and they see that women are held to lower standards and have a much lower fitness requirement to max out the PFT, that causes cultural reverberations down the line, said retired Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who was in charge of training female recruits at Parris Island. When women face lower expectations, they end up being less competitive than their male counterparts, Germano told Marine Corps Times.

We end up letting the institution down because we have an end product that isnt fit, isnt strong and cant compete with the menand how disappointing is that, from a national security perspective? she said.

For the routine fitness tests that Marines face, the gap between standards for men and women is clear:

Many experts say the Marines' current policy makes sense. Theres clear scientific evidence that men on average are physically stronger than women.

For example, when male and female Marine recruits arrive at Parris Island boot camp, they undergo a gender-neutral strength test and they do not perform equally.

For the men, about 98.6 percent pass the test. For women, its 92.7 percent.

It would be too difficult to determine a single physical standard for men and womenand most likely, such a standard would be too difficult for women to reach, said Brian Schilling, chair of kinesiology and nutrition sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

It is biologically correct to say that physically fit for a woman is different than physically fit for a man, Schilling said. This is based on sex differences in body composition, muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiorespiratory endurance, etc.

Both the PFT and CFT are meant to measure a Marines overall fitness, not how ready they are for combat, said Schilling.

The issue of gender roles and standards has never been more contentious inside the Marine Corps.

Those concerns and controversies are leading to questions about the fitness standards, which critics say may be fueling a culture of misogyny inside the force.

Women, from Day One, do not have to do the same PFT as men, said Maximilian Uriarte, a Marine veteran and the creator of the Terminal Lance comic strip.

To men, thats immediately like: Oh, they have not accomplished the same thing I have Therefore, they do not rate the same respect that I do, he said.

One way to erase the gender gap, Uriarte said in an interview with Marine Corps Times, would be to have women meet the same standards as men on the PFT and CFT.

I think youd probably lose a lot of women, but the ones youd keep would be really stellar, fighting, fit Marines that the men would respect on that level, he said.

If somebody says, Dont run faster than 21 minutes, its going to be really hard to get an individual to run faster than 21 minutes, Hunter said.

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New concerns that lower fitness standards fuel disrespect for women - Marine Corps Times

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Home » Fitness » New concerns that lower fitness standards fuel disrespect for women – Marine Corps Times