Information from military.com.
600 is the max score on the Army Combat Fitness Test. Since October, 66 women soldiers have scored 500 or above, while 31,978 men soldiers reached that platform. That’s 66 women total.
On pass-fail, 7 percent of men soldiers failed their last test, while 44 percent of women soldiers failed.
Sergeant Major of the Army Michael A. Grinston says the Army “has made efforts to better prepare soldiers for the test, such as adding athletic coaches to all brigades.” A brigade has 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers. Military.com did not say whether the sergeant major meant one coach or several.
Women soldiers failing Army physical performance tests has been an issue since December 2015, when then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter directed all military positions and jobs open to women.
It's not that women are more "out of shape" than men. It's that the distributions are so different. Women, on average, have 52% of the upper body strength of men, and 66% of the lower body strenght, in one european study from 1993. And this has been replicated, roughly, in other studies.
ReplyDeleteThis does not mean that *all* women have less body strength than *all* men -- but it means that the distributions are widely different. The difference, by the way, is due mostly to muscle mass and length. Men and women who have the same muscle mass and limb length tend to be very close -- though other studies suggest that males have larger muscle fibers as well. Finally, ovarian hormones tend to inhibit protein synthesis (making muscle building more difficult), and androgenic hormones (e.g testosterone) tend to promote protein synthesis. Thus, it is much more difficult for women to build muscle mass and will build less muscle mass given the same exercises.
Thus, if you have a physical test of strength that 70% of men would pass, you would expect that only 20-30% of women would pass it -- if both samples were taken randomly from the general population.
Of course, both men and women who volunteer for military service represent a biased selection, but you would still expect to see a significant difference, and you would expect more women to fail an equally applied test of strength and endurance. Extra coaching of women on these tests will certainly increase the success rate, but a test that is difficult for men will continue to be very, very difficult for women.
It may be feasible to give women androgenic hormones to increase their lean body mass, but turning women transgender males would likely not be considered a "success" by a sizeable proportion of the woke policy makers.
You are right about muscle and strength distribution, and everything else in your reply. Good information. On the practical side, I searched for weight of 120mm tank round and got answers ranging from 40 to 50 pounds. I think those are low figures. Not a whole lot of women have gone into armor MOS anyway. Why designers of PT tests assumed women would have similar scores to men is a question no one has asked.
DeleteThe basic problem is that people are moving towards pushing transhumanism, where *all* biological features are fungible and plastic. Men can become women. Women can become men. White people can "identify" as black. Black people can "identify" as white." And on and on. All biological features are malleable, and are thus arbitrary, and any distinctions made on their basis is false.
DeleteThis is currently held in contrast to our *psychological* components, which are shaped by the environment, but once shaped, are immutable. Thus, it is "anti-scientific" to claim that there is a "real" biologic difference between men and women, and we can change between the two at will. However, sexual *orientation* is writ in stone, and any belief that *it* is mutable is "anti-scientific." This latter position is, however, also temporary. The ultimate vision is that we are all clay in some potters hand, to be fashioned for the good of society.
"Male and female He created them..." The potters of now will find their wheels fly apart.
DeleteJust need to move the goal posts.
ReplyDeleteThat has been done at least a couple of times. So far, the Army has not gone the route of "We'll keep changing until we get the answers we're looking for.
ReplyDelete