After decades of affirmative action, including gender quotas, the data are now in.  Why are they being ignored?  How much more damage will be done?

I’m going to focus this commentary on women in the police and military forces.  The politically correct policy for years has been to integrate women into jobs for which, as it turns out, they are clearly less suited than the men who would otherwise have filled those critical positions.  Moreover, the policy is to expand the program, by allowing women into the elite military forces such as the Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, forces for which only a small percentage of male applicants qualify, and possibly no women could.  The claim is that the standards will not be lowered, but in fact, they already have been.

The extreme price which has been paid includes the death of female Navy pilot Lt. Kara Hultgreen, who was killed while attempting to land on an aircraft carrier, but crashed instead.  Critics of the policy noted that Hultgreen was pushed through her training program only because the Navy had been pressured to certify women pilots in what has been called the most difficult and dangerous occupation in the Navy.  Political correctness won. The nation, and Hultgreen, lost.

That is the case with other occupations in the U.S. Navy. One qualification for sailors used to be that, in the event of an emergency, a sailor must be able to carry a wounded sailor to safety, including climbing from the lowest compartment of a sinking ship, to the surface deck. Because few (or no) women could do this, the requirement has been eliminated. Currently, the physical fitness standards for women include a minimum performance of 11 pushups, compared to 33 for men, at age 35. That is triple for men, compared to women.

The Marine Corps is also being pressured to lower its standards to accommodate women.

My military career, from 1968 to 1990, spanned the epoch in which at first, women were merely an auxiliary force, to one in which feminist politics became a powerful factor. I witnessed first-hand how performance statistics were skewed to give a favorable, but false, impression that women could meet the standards.  In one 30-day field exercise, in which I participated, observers witnessed that most of the women were doing well, and this was the official report, after which the evaluators went home. Unfortunately, beginning the next day, exhaustion began to set in, and the men had to step in and do the jobs which the females were too worn out to perform.

At age 40, I could outrun 22-year-old military women in the mile-and-a-half physical fitness test, and their standards were lower than mine.

Now to the police. I enjoy watching the so-called reality shows on TV, such as “Cops,” and others, in which police officers are filmed performing their duties. These include both men and women. If one watches these shows, one can hardly miss the disparities in the ability of female officers to chase down and subdue fleeing, violent “suspects.” 

Recently, I watched on TV as a male-and-female pair of officers apprehended a pair of miscreants. The female officer immediately lost control of the suspect in her grasp. He escaped. The male officer chased down the other criminal, wrestled him and handcuffed him.

In one case in New York, inside a courthouse, a criminal overpowered a female police officer, took her gun, and shot another officer to death with it. This female police officer, of petite stature, should never have been assigned the task of escorting this prisoner, and only political correctness mandated this policy.

While these examples are anecdotal, the anecdotes are far too numerous to ignore. The evidence is overwhelming that, in far too many cases, the politics of “fairness” outweighs the practicalities of public safety and national security.

This is not to say that women are inferior to men, nor that they should be excluded from jobs which they can do. It is simply to say that reason, logic, and common sense should trump ideology.