Females on US Navy Submarines

Kamila Shurmanova

Up until 2010 in the US there was a ban of women on Navy, however with this ban being listed more women are enlisted to serve on subs both as privates and officers. In order to make submarines for women to serve on, they are being redesigned so they would be more suitable for women on the board. These changes include adjusting seats, making them a little closer to the panel, lowering overhead valves, adding one more bathroom to the sub, installing steps to the triple-high bunk beds. The changes would make women’s presence in the sub more efficient, because they would feel more comfortable and would be able to perform as good as male soldiers. However, with the number of obvious pros come cons, Electric Boat officials did not make proper estimations on the issue of the costs of these changes, and also these adjustments might make male’s service less efficient. New readjusted Columbia-class ballistic-missile sub will join fleet in 2031, generally this sub will make the service of females and males that differ in height and weight from an average soldier.

Redesigning subs for the convenience of female soldiers is a sign of moving past the prejudices and discrimination and changing attitude towards women in the army.   Feaver and Kohn’s (2001) research shows that elite officers were opposed to females serving in army. Generally, the experiment shows that combatant women are more supportive of integrating more women to army forces, less civilian women voted for the reform, as for the men, civilian men are more supportive of the idea than combatant male. Feaver and Kohn (2001) emphasizes two finding on the topic: ‘elite military officers are more supportive of gender equality in the services than are mass civilians, up to, but not including women in combat’ and another finding is that male officers are less supportive of females in combat than mass civilians in general. The fact that military is trying to make the conditions more convenient for females, shows that the attitude is finally changing. 

_______

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/04/19/us/ap-us-redesigning-submarines.html?module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=U.S.&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article