Women Get Pregnant! (And Men Don't)

Surprise! You heard it here second, folks. You heard it first from Professor Kingsley Browne, as another reason why women should not be permitted in military combat or combat support roles. It goes without saying that pregnancy will cause women to, at times, be unable to perform in various military roles, including combat-related roles. Whether this should disqualify all women from such roles? Browne would answer "yes", whereas the military has implicitly answered, "We can plan for it, and accommodate it". Professor "argue from anecdote and don't worry about the facts" asserts,

Women’s ability to avoid deployment by becoming pregnant is a constant source of resentment among men. Intentionally injuring oneself to avoid deployment is a court-martial offense; intentionally becoming pregnant to avoid deployment brings no penalty at all, nor does becoming pregnant to avoid deployment, missing the deployment, and then aborting the pregnancy – a pattern that creates even intensified resentment. This latter phenomenon is almost certainly something that the military does not track, so it is hard to know how widespread it is, but while I was researching my book, several people (all Navy officers) spontaneously mentioned it to me.

Okay... so the fact that women can get pregnant causes resentment among the He-Men of Kingsley Browne's military - although they're chomping at the bit to demonstrate their toughness and masculinity on the battlefield, they simultaneously resent women because some become pregnant and aren't deployed? The toughest of the tough succumbing to womb envy?

It is interesting that the "worst example" of pregnancy Browne can muster is one that he can't actually demonstrate has ever occurred. Even assuming it had, it would seem to be an exceedingly rare phenomenon. But given a few misogynistic whispers about what could happen, Browne places them "front and center" in his argument.

Browne seems reluctant to place the "you can't put women among a bunch of horny men" argument on Volokh, perhaps because he fears being eaten alive in the comments, but it's so much part and parcel of his mindset that I knew he had to be making it. Sure enough.

Combat groups have to be cohesive and cohesive groups are cooperative, focusing on a mission. And if you take a group of, you know, late teens, early twenties guys who are focused on a mission, drop a few women into the group and all of a sudden their focus is somewhere else....

I don't know if you've heard of this book called "Love My Rifle More Than You" by Kayla Williams, a woman who served in Iraq, and she described her experience in Iraq as a massive frat party with weapons. And, uh, the fact is that there's human nature and military discipline doesn't always trump human nature.

From another interview,

Q: Is there any other reason women shouldn't be flying combat aircraft?

A: Well, the possibility of being a POW, which raises special problems. Once captured, female prisoners face a substantial risk of rape, and that's something that, for the most part, men don't face.

Q: If a woman is willing to take that risk, shouldn't she be allowed to?

A: The thing is, it doesn't just affect her. The captors may very well also have male prisoners, and can use the abuse or threats of abuse of female prisoners as a means of extracting information or other kinds of co-operation from male prisoners....

Because there's no military in the world that would try to elicit confessions by sexually abusing and sexually humiliating male prisoners, right? And men just can't take it when one of those cowardly, untrustworthy women who serve with them might get hurt.

In summary, Browne has two valid points:

1. Strength differences exist between men and women, and those differences are a valid consideration when determining who should serve in combat roles; and
2. Young women serving in the military become pregnant at a considerable, predictable rate, and their inability to serve in certain military roles during and after pregnancy, as well as whether their units will remain effective if they cannot deploy, are valid concerns for the military.

For some reason, he apparently feels compelled to bury those points in a mountain of misogynistic supposition. Wouldn't it be more useful to look at how the U.S. militaries (and other militaries that are sexually integrated) have accommodated women, and whether or not those accommodations had an effect on combat readiness? Would that be so hard?

Cowardly, Untrustworthy Women....

Kingsley Browne has added to his list of reasons why women shouldn't serve in combat-related military roles. Men don't trust women, and women are cowards. The first post reminds me of two things - the incompetent analysis William Saletan attempted to pass off as "evolutionary biology" to support the thesis that black people (as a "race") are less intelligent than whites or Asians, and of why we used to have a racially segregated military. Browne could have written this forty years ago, as a protest against troop integration, and he wouldn't have to change much of what he says.

Browne doesn't require much support for his thesis - any grain of sand will do, provided it arguably weighs against women:

A study of male and female support troops in the Gulf War, none of whom had seen combat, found that women reported significantly more psychological stress than men, especially stress in anticipation of combat.

Empathy also has negative effects, as it not only engenders a reluctance to kill but is also associated with greater guilt for having killed. Some reports coming back from Iraq suggest that women are suffering higher levels, and a more severe form, of PTSD than men are.

For the first argument, that could mean that women are more in touch with their feelings than men - not that they felt more fear, but that they were more aware of their fear. We could extrapolate from that, Browne-style, that perhaps it should be interpreted to support the role of women in combat, because they're more conscious of their fear and thus able to discount its effects when making decisions. I'm not saying the evidence supports that - I'm just demonstrating how Browne's style of speculative argument cuts both ways.

As for "some reports" suggesting that women suffer from higher levels or more severe forms of PTSD, it seems implicit within Browne's description that the evidence is not yet in - but if it weighs against women, he reports it anyway. And again we have something that cuts both ways - is the problem that women suffer greater incidence of PTSD, or is the problem that men underreport their psychological symptoms (particularly "manly men" of the personality type that Browne has described - masculine leaders, physically aggressive, strong, fearless, highly tolerant of pain....) I'm willing to accept that the evidence is not yet in. In contrast, Browne doesn't seem to care.

As for manly men seeking out social opportunities with many men, well, great. As for “masculinity” and “leadership” being "the two most important traits of soldiers who were judged to be effective fighters", that's great also, but overlooks the fact that it is implicit that not all soldiers were deemed "effective", let to be especially "masculine" or to be "leaders". While it seems reasonable to accept that women, definitionally, are less masculine than men, women are capable of leadership. And less "masculine" men can and do serve in combat. Also, to Browne, trust isn't built over time (all that effort the military puts into building unit cohesion, apparently, is wasted) - it's a gut reaction based on manliness:

In making gut-level decisions, the human mind tends to be attentive to the kinds of information available to us in our ancestral environment. So, good grades at a military academy or high scores on a personality test would be unlikely to engender trust even if they were in fact correlated with combat performance, in the same way that a woman’s appearance will be more important to the strength of a man’s sexual attraction to her than a certificate of fertility from a medical specialist. Intuitive judgments are not easy to change with reasoned argument.

Thus, there is reason to believe that some impediments to effective sexual integration are, in a sense, “hard-wired” into us. If so, the resistance of combat troops to sexual integration is not something that they are going to “grow out of.”

The common name given to those "impediments" being... sexism? "Sorry, ladies, men are sexist by nature and you need to just put up with it." And this thesis is built upon what? A foundation of assumption. (I wonder if his mention of sexual attraction is foreshadowing - as I indicated yesterday, I think it's just a matter of time before he unveils the "you can't put women among those horny guys" argument.)

Some respond to this line of argument by contending that a tendency of men not to trust women is “men’s problem,” not women’s. The issue is not, however, whose “fault” it is (and it is not clear that the concept of fault is even relevant here). Instead, the point is that this lack of trust – whatever its source – poses a risk to the effectiveness of military units. Thus, the lack of trust is a problem for both men and women, as well as for the military (and the nation) as a whole.

If there is a lack of trust, and if it cannot be overcome, that's a potential issue, sure. But as of yet, Professor Browne has not demonstrated that the lack of trust exists, let alone that it is "hard wired", and has not demonstrated that it is a problem. While he keeps telling us what he thinks of women, he's doing an astonishingly poor job of supporting his various assumptions and prejudices.

Aristotle wrote that “a man would be thought a coward if he had no more courage than a courageous woman.” That may seem a gratuitously chauvinistic comment, but it captures an important truth. How often does one even hear of a woman referred to as a coward? The dictionary defines “cowardice” as “disgraceful fear or timidity.” We do not decline to label women cowards because women do not display fear or timidity. Instead, we do so because we do not find women’s fear or timidity disgraceful in settings in which we would see disgrace in men.

It sounds like a gratuitously chauvinistic comment because it is a gratuitously chauvinistic comment. It may be that women are not often characterized as cowardly, but it is fatuous to assume that this means that women cannot be brave.

We should never forget that the average soldier would really like to run away from the fighting. The group prevents him from doing this. If group morality allows for an “honourable” means of flight, it will be accepted gratefully.

Exactly this dynamic may have been in play in 2004 when a mixed-sex platoon of reservists refused a direct order to drive a fuel convoy, although the Army’s reticence about the incident compels one to rely on (perhaps unfair) speculation. The reservists argued that it was a “suicide mission” because their trucks were not armored. News reports did not indicate who the ringleaders of the mutiny were, although it came to light when a female specialist left a message on her mother’s voice mail asking her to “raise pure hell.”

It "may have been in play"? Or it may not. But it doesn't matter to Professor Browne because, as with his EP-3E example, he apparently isn't one to let the facts get in the way of his argument.

Whether as a result of contagion or under the guise of "protecting" fearful women, this idea that being around women turns men into quivering cowards is interesting, but where's the actual support for that? Even in Browne's cartoonish version of "evolutionary psychology", shouldn't we be expecting that the manly men of the military will be puffing out their chests and engaging in acts of bravado in order to impress the ladies? The question becomes, why does Browne see women as a population of emasculating Delilahs?

Update: Prof. Browne's "latest responses to comments" are partially responsive to points I have made here. For example, with regard to race,

The fact is that race and sex are different as categories. Although both of them have underlying biological bases, racial segregation in the military had nothing to do with the biology of race and everything to do with the social meaning placed upon race. Despite arguments to the contrary, however, sex is not just a social construct, and sex differences relevant to military service exist irrespective of what we think about them.

That, of course, is not responsive to the analogy. The comparison was not premised upon gender being "real" and race being a "social construct". The analogy was drawn on the basis that sexism and racism are both real, and that Browne's sexist positions do not appear any more valid than the racist justifications for past military segregation. There were, and are, people who will happily argue that race is "real" and that the intellectual and social differences between races cannot be overcome. Browne rejects their version of "evolutionary psychology", but he has presented no genuine foundation for his own.

As for his failure to cite to authority,

When I started writing my entries, I had to make a judgment about whether to cite to the relevant literature. I decided, for better or worse, not to, for a variety of reasons. First, assuming that I did not provide authority for every assertion, there was the difficulty in drawing the line between assertions for which I would provide authority and those for which I would not. Second, not all (or perhaps even most) readers of blogs expect or want to read heavily sourced, academic style writings, and I assumed that people seriously interested in the underlying research would go to my book (and, of course, I hoped that they would buy it for themselves, as well as for everyone on their Christmas card list).

Perhaps the most fundamental reason for not citing to the relevant literature is that a one-sentence assertion in a blog post might be summarizing several pages of my book, which in turn might be citing numerous authorities. To give one example, in my post on cohesion and trust I stated: “Formation of, and functioning in, large cohesive groups is easier for men than for women, and men are more accepting of hierarchy than women are.” I was criticized for “bald assertion” in making this point, and, of course, the assertion was “bald,” if that means that I cited no authority for it. However, that one sentence summarized about five pages from my book that contained nineteen footnotes that cited to over twenty separate sources, most from the psychological literature. That does not mean that my inferences and conclusions are correct, of course, but it does mean that I didn’t make them up out of whole cloth.

That's a cop-out. First, whatever his initial impression about blogging, it would have been clear to him pretty much from the outset that he was expected to do more than make "bald assertions". Second, complaining, "citing to authority is hard", is not a compelling reason to leave your arguments unsupported. If he really has to cite to five pages of explanatory text and fifteen footnotes to support a single sentence, he leaves the impression not that he has engaged in careful research, but that he is hiding behind a maze of overlapping sources which may or may not actually support his blanket thesis. And if we are to accept that this is typical of his work....

To look at it another way, the study of small group dynamics is a bona fide field of study, and not a new one. There are decades of research into group formation, function and cohesion, many of which consider gender. If Browne cannot find among the body of peer reviewed studies on this subject even one which supports his sentence, such that he must draw his conclusion based upon a mishmash of fifteen or more sources, it is more likely that the body of work upon which he relies does not adequately support his thesis than that he correctly gleaned an insight from the works of dozens of social scientists, for whom this is their primary field of study, that everybody else somehow missed.

Women in Combat

Over at the Volokh conspiracy, guest blogger Kingsley Browne opines that women don't belong in combat. Lawyers tend to open with their strongest argument, in this case strength. Browne follows up with a post about the fragile psychology of the fairer sex. He has yet to get to the "you can't have women among a bunch of horny guys" argument, or the "women might be sexually abused by the enemy" argument, but I'm quite confident that he will.

Apparently this stuff falls under the guise of "evolutionary psychology", which is a legitimate field of discipline but in the hands of somebody like Browne seems to become justification for taking all of his sexist preconceptions and calling them "science". Given that he has actually published a book on this subject, his reasoning is surprisingly weak and relies far too heavily on anecdote. For example:

Some assert that these large physical differences can be overcome through training. In fact, however, training often increases the sex difference.

If you take a man and woman of equal strength, and give them similar training such that the woman meets a strength standard, it may well be that at the end of the training the man exceeds that standard. But that's not even slightly relevant to the question of whether the woman meets the standard - she does.

When a Navy EP-3E reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter plane over the South China Sea in April 2001, the muscular pilot had to “wrestle” the plane down to a safe landing on Hainan Island. He reported that it took “every ounce” of his strength to keep the plane in the air until he could land. Perhaps there are many men who would not have been able to meet that challenge, but it is unlikely that any female pilot could have.

In another context Browne asserts that the pilot was a 220 pound man - maybe he thinks that the minimum weight for pilots should be 220 pounds, just in case? Or would he recognize arguing from the anecdote as absurd within that context?

Similarly, if a ship gets struck by a bomb, missile, or mine, all hands may have to turn to the tasks of damage control, such as fire fighting, flood limitation, and evacuation of the wounded. In 1988, after the guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, it came closer than any other U.S. ship since the Korean War to be sunk due to hostile action. Sailors of all specialties turned to fighting the resulting fire and flooding.

Because the captain of the Roberts was concerned that shells would “cook off,” he ordered one of the magazines cleared of ammunition. A “bucket brigade” of fifty sailors – twenty percent of the ship’s crew – passed the fifty-pound shells from man to man. Although the regular job duties of many of these sailors did not require heavy lifting, if the sailors had been unable to perform when necessary, the Roberts would almost certainly have sunk.

I would expect that, even within this emergency context, some thought was given to which men would be best suited to the "bucket brigade". I doubt that the Captain called upon fifty random people to take this task. Even if we assume that no women on the ship would have been suited to man the "fire brigade", what percentage of women would have to be on board before you could no longer call upon fifty sailors able to heft the shells? To Browne, that number appears irrelevant, but practically speaking I doubt that under current Navy policies it could reach a point where the Captain could not adequately man his "fire brigade". If we're going to get into a series of "but's"... "But the military could change its rules and allow more women," then that's when the argument about physical strength should be made.

Browne is concerned that even in support roles, women may have to engage in combat.

Hand-to-hand combat (yes, it still happens) is the last resort of all war-fighters, as well as of those occupying support positions, whether signalmen, clerks, cooks, or truck drivers.

Even though he acknowledges that women perform in many combat support roles, and cannot point to even an anecdote where disaster resulted, this vision of "hand to hand combat" is enough in his mind to disqualify all women from combat support.

I am going to give him his due - there are positions in the military which require significant physical strength, and whether you are looking at the population at large or within the military itself, you are likely to find far more men who are capable of performing those positions than you are women. But there are many combat support roles which require less physical strength, and there are many women who can perform feats of considerable strength. Although Browne concedes that women can be tested for their physical capacity, he deems this irrelevant as he consider gender an appropriate proxy for " predicting whether one has what it takes psychologically to be effective in combat ". Which takes us to his second, weaker argument.

One of the dangers in the field of psychology is that somebody will hear a general rule of human behavior and assume that it must apply to everybody. More commonly, even a good a rule of thumb may apply to only 80% of the target population. So when Browne asserts that women are more risk averse than men, or have higher fear levels, even if we assume the validity of the studies behind his assertions, if he knows what he's talking about he should be aware that he's not actually describing all women. Add to that self-selection - the fact that women who do not have a psychology that disposes them toward combat and combat support roles are not likely to seek out that type of military career - and the rule of thumb may become nearly or wholly inapplicable to the self-selected population.

The same holds true for his broad statements about "physical aggression and dominance". When he starts extrapolating further, telling us how empathetic women are and how they are predisposed to feel "heightened guilt and anxiety... about acting aggressively " It's simply not true of all women. To get to the point where Browne wants to take us, we have to assume that women who are interested in combat and combat support roles have higher levels of anxiety, guilt, empathy, etc., than an average man - something he has failed to even attempt to show. And we have to assume that military training cannot help people overcome squeamishness at such acts as pointing a firearm at another human being and pulling the trigger, or running toward somebody who is shooting at you and trying to kill you - yet it does. If he's trying to imply that it is more difficult to train females to face their fears, anxiety and guilt, he should present his evidence. (Browne admits, "Some women possess more physical courage and willingness to kill than some men.", but gives no apparent thought to why that's the case.

He also argues that women withstand pain less well than men. I suspect that if you look behind that claim you will find that for all people, your ability to withstand pain is related to your prior experience with pain. A high school student who plays football or joins the wrestling team is likely to experience physical pain and stress as part of his sport of choice, and to gain tolerance for that pain as a result of practice and competition. The military seems to understand this, and it no doubt plays a role in why boot camp is physically gruelling. The question becomes, are women in combat and combat support roles insufficiently able to withstand pain to reliably perform their duties? Browne, as you might expect, presents no evidence on that question.)

With no offense intended to Professor Browne, my guess is that if you picked an average woman out of a combat support role, she would outperform him physically, on the mental issues he deems crucial to combat, and in tolerance to pain. That's fine - his personality led him to hang out in law libraries, study and become a professor, despite the constant risk of paper cut, and hers led her into the military. It's what you should expect.
__________________

Update: Browne responds to comments over at Volokh (which I haven't read), and some of what he says relates to points I have made. He confirms that I was correct in anticipating a "that's different" defense, in relation to his anecdote about the 220 pound pilot:

The point of that story was not that all military planes present equivalent strength demands but that strength demands can crop up when things go wrong, even if a job does not require strength when things go right (which is the same point made about the USS Samuel B. Roberts). Moreover, no matter how high-tech the aircraft, once you are shot down, you are essentially an under-armed infantryman whose obligations are to survive (and assist fellow crew members in doing so, perhaps by dragging them from the wreckage), evade pursuers, resist potential captors, and escape from captivity.

The first point begs the question - if the answer is, "you can never be too strong," then we need to increase strength standards across the board. If we don't, strong enough remains strong enough, whether any given man or woman might benefit from additional strength in times of crisis. As for his implying women are too weak and craven to survive behind enemy lines, again he's arguing from his own biases, and he makes no effort to support his new claim with any evidence. Did he even stop to ponder that there were three women on the EP-3E crew at the heart of his example?

He argues that men are more likely to have personality characteristics "to overcome fear in the face of mortal danger, to be willing to take the fight to the enemy if the mission demands it – risking their lives in the process – and to inflict lethal violence on the enemy..." and thus,

That’s where the lack of predictability comes in. It is a staple of the combat-behavior literature that it is often a surprise who turns out to be an effective fighter (and who doesn’t). Because some people do very well in training but bomb out in actual combat, you can’t count on training to weed out those who won’t do well.

Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Browne, but the finding he cites relates primarily to men. After emphasizing (perhaps caricaturing) the psychological difference between men and women, when it is convenient to his argument Browne assumes them to be the same.

One or more of the commenters made the valid point that women who want to serve in the combat arms are not going to be the “average woman.” That is true, but the men who serve in the combat arms are also not “average men.” There will be a selection bias operating in both groups, although no doubt the female combat volunteer would deviate more from the female average than the male combat volunteer would from the male average.

Another argument of convenience. Browne is happy to compare the entire population of women to the entire population of men. He is happy to compare the entire population of women to the act of a single man in an isolated situation. But when you ask that he look at the actual population under discussion - women who want combat and combat support roles in the military - he implies that the comparison should be to men who are seeking combat roles. So much for using gender as a proxy.