Army Opens More Job Spots for Women

The Army, the last of the military services to act on a Pentagon-wide review of women’s roles in the military, announced Monday that it will open more than a dozen additional job specialties to female soldiers. But the service stopped short of moving female GIs into positions that would expose them to combat.

The move could bring women into 11,138 Army jobs that have been available only to men, Army officials said. These include coveted staff positions at division headquarters and some rear-area air defense battalions where women now serve only in support functions.

The new list also includes “nontraditional” jobs for women, such as driving dump trucks and backhoes and laying electrical lines with engineering units.

“The overall message is that the secretary is firmly committed to open all positions to women that are compatible with existing laws,” said David J. Armor, the Pentagon official who headed the department’s Task Force on Women in the Military.

Women’s group representatives hailed the action.

“We’re chipping away” at obstacles, said Victoria Almquist, director of the Women in the Military project at the Women’s Equity Action League. “ . . .That’s the stuff that leads to promotions, and when you get into positions like that, it breaks down further barriers.”

Armor said the service’s biggest challenge now may be in persuading women to take many of the additional jobs, particularly those involving low-echelon construction or maintenance work.

All the services “have a selling job to do” to bring females into the full range of 24,000 jobs opened up to them for the first time in the last year, he said.

Former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger established the Task Force on Women in the Military in September, 1987, to review women’s roles after several women’s groups charged that uniformed women face widespread sexual harassment and limited career opportunities in the armed forces. Last December, the Navy and Marine Corps, responding to recommendations from the task force, opened more than 9,500 jobs to women, including flight crew slots on submarine-hunting aircraft and positions with the Marines’ elite embassy security guard units. Last July, the Air Force opened 2,700 additional job slots.

The services lifted many of the job restrictions in conjunction with an effort to use a single, uniform standard for reviewing jobs, eliminating discrepancies and arbitrary exclusions between the branches.

“We are seeing thousands of positions open because we are applying a standard definition” of combat risk, Armor said.

However, about half of the 2.2 million military jobs still are not open to women, mostly because of a 1948 law excluding women from duty in combat jobs. The law specifically mentions only the Navy and the Air Force, but the Army also follows it as a policy.

Because women are eligible for only 1.1 million military jobs, fewer women are recruited than men and that may make filling some of the less glamorous additional jobs difficult, officials said.

“I don’t think we’ll ever have 50% of jobs filled with women,” said Armor. “We have to take what comes through the door.” In 1987, women composed 10.2% of military personnel.

Armor said that changes in Army doctrine have led the service to reconsider the combat risks of some jobs. The Army’s traditional war-fighting plans have assumed that “electrical distribution” and combat support engineering units would proceed quickly to the battle lines. In recent years, however, those strategies have changed, allowing such units to remain out of direct combat and making jobs in them available for women.