Women Making Waves in Navy : Service Is Charting a New Course as More Females Are Going to Sea

It happens sometimes at cocktail parties. Capt. John C. Ruff is pointed out or introduced and someone shakes his head and says, “I feel so sorry for you. I wouldn’t be in your position for anything.”

Each time it happens, Ruff is annoyed. A 30-year Navy veteran, he has climbed through the ranks to become commanding officer of the Cape Cod, a destroyer tender with a crew of about 1,200, and he has no patience with the offerings of sympathy.

It’s just no big deal, Ruff says, that nearly 20% of his crew is female. His ship has 238 women aboard, one of the largest female contingents in the Navy. With the addition of 226 openings for women over the next two years, the crew of the San Diego-based ship will be more than 40% female.

For many civilian workplaces, those numbers would indeed be no big deal. But in the male-dominated world of the Navy, where women until the mid-1970s were barred from any jobs at sea, there remains considerable skepticism and resistance to the changing makeup of the work force. Concerns range from minor gripes by men annoyed that they may no longer walk around in their underwear to questions about shipboard romances and pregnancy.

As the Cape Cod crew component becomes less of an anomaly in the Navy, those officers who pity its captain could soon find themselves commanding substantial numbers of women themselves, or even working for them.

The Navy recently named Cmdr. Deborah S. Gernes, 39, the Cape Cod’s former executive officer, the first woman eligible to command a ship, although it will be a year or so before she receives her first sea command. Navy officials predict that it will not be long before several more women are promoted to Gernes’ level.

Although women are barred by law from serving on combat ships, the Navy is opening increasing numbers of assignments on noncombat ships to women, who now make up nearly 10% of the naval force. About 4,900 of the Navy’s 49,000 enlisted women are assigned to ships and more than 1,000 additional openings for women on ships went unfilled because of mismatching in skills, according to a Navy report released a year ago.

Substantial numbers of women now work on destroyer tenders, supply ships and other Navy vessels that provide support for aircraft carrier groups as they steam into hot spots like the Persian Gulf. The Acadia, a San Diego-based destroyer tender with a large contingent of women, was among the ships that came to the aid of the Stark, the Navy frigate that was attacked by Iraqi warplanes in the Persian Gulf in 1987.

The Acadia “did a magnificent job” after the Stark attack, said Capt. Gordon Peterson, a Navy spokesman in Washington. “There were young men and women sailors working side by side under very arduous conditions to bring the Stark home.

“Navy women . . . are making a growing contribution,” Peterson said, “and the contribution is going to grow even more in the future as we expand the opportunity for them to serve at sea.”

In recent years, the Navy has pushed the definition of a noncombat ship to what may be its limit, permitting women to serve at sea aboard ships such as the Acadia that wait at the fringes of potential combat areas.

Unless Congress decides to change the law, however, future opportunities for women in the Navy will continue to be limited to ships like the Cape Cod. Navy officials studying the issues surrounding the entry of so many women into the service watch the Cape Cod for signs of what problems to expect and what concerns to dismiss.

Problems Less Serious

For Ruff, who took over as commanding officer of the Cape Cod two years ago, the problems have been less serious than he feared. “I’ve lived in a male dominated world in the Navy all my life,” Ruff said. He conceded that he felt a little uneasy about having Gernes as his executive officer, the second-in-command and alter ego on the ship. His fears turned out to be baseless, he said.

“With a male, traditionally that’s an easy relationship to establish,” Ruff said. “We are comfortable with that. We’re familiar with that. I’ve lived in that world before, but I’ve never been in that world with a woman . . . so there was a little bit of trepidation.”

Ruff said he told Gernes “from the very beginning that she was going to have the closest platonic relationship she was ever going to have with a man.”

“No captain is a tower of strength,” he said. “We are just like any other individual. We have peaks and valleys and she or he has to look at the peaks or valleys, and where I had a valley she had to have a peak. Her personality had to be subordinated to mine.”

Overall, they developed an “excellent relationship” and were able to “shout at each other just like anybody else,” Ruff said. “She is a very professional, very competent officer. She was not what you would call a shy flower, and she couldn’t be.”

In an interview last January before she left the Cape Cod for an assignment on the East Coast, Gernes said she encountered no unusual problems as one of the first female executive officers in the Navy and did not find it difficult to give orders to men. “I’ve never found it a problem and hopefully they never have,” she said. “I think most of them are very happy for me and they have congratulated me.”

Joined Navy in 1973

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Gernes joined the Navy in 1973 with the intention of leaving after a four-year stint. “But once I got in I really enjoyed it and I decided to stay,” she said. “It’s much better now for a woman to be in the Navy.”

When she joined, “women were seldom even allowed on naval vessels, much less to be in the ship’s company,” she said. “And the thought of commanding one never crossed my mind. . . . It feels great.”

Gernes said she and most other women in the Navy would like to see the federal law on women in combat changed to eliminate the remaining limitations on their jobs. “Most of us feel that we have a greater contribution to make and that we could make them on all ship types.”

As the first woman to be selected for command, Gernes said she feels “some pressure” to perform well. “Naturally you feel as though everybody’s watching you when you’re the first.”

Gernes said that during her two years aboard the Cape Cod, including a six-month deployment in the north Arabian Sea, there were few problems related to men and women serving together.

“I think anytime you have a sexually integrated crew, even on a shore situation, you’re going to have some problems with the interaction of men and women. We try to treat each case as a separate case just as anyone on a shore station would and try not to make a large issue of it.

Occasional Problems

“The men and women interact as friends. They interact as co-workers. They have to depend on each other in times of emergency and they do that very well as a rule, but there are occasional problems.” Relations between male and female crew members are “probably one of the smaller items that the commanding officer of any ship has to face,” Gernes said. “There are far bigger problems that you need to worry about. Such things as maintaining your ship, maintaining discipline, maintaining morale, making sure that your ship meets all its commitments, making sure that it’s ready in all respects, making sure the dependents are well taken care of.”

Nevertheless, mixed-gender crews can make for some nettlesome problems, not the least of which is pregnancy. In 1987, 46 women assigned to the Cape Cod became pregnant, according to Ruff, who, like other Navy officers, sees pregnancy as a potential roadblock to future advances for women in the Navy.

Under Navy policy, a woman may not embark on a cruise if she is pregnant at the time her ship is deployed. If a woman becomes pregnant while at sea, she may stay aboard the ship only until the 20th week of pregnancy. However, she may leave earlier if her medical condition warrants it or if she opts to resign from the Navy.

Ruff said he and Gernes had a standing joke on the subject: “If you turn up pregnant, you can have your choice. You want the port or the starboard yardarm? Because I’m going to hang you from one and the guy from the other. . . . I would have killed her if she turned up pregnant.”

During the Cape Cod’s last cruise, to the north Arabian Sea, four or five cases of improper “fraternization” occurred, Ruff said. “Sexual relationships occurred, and when we found them we dealt with them.”

A typical case involved “two young people playing licky-face in a passageway,” he said. “That’s fraternization. You can’t touch. You can sit there and look at her as long as you want, but you can’t touch her--and don’t touch him.”

Romance Is Out

Romantic relationships are barred because “there are no private places” on a ship and because they can lead to favoritism.

“He ceases to look at this other person as a military person and starts looking upon her, or him, as a special person, so they get special consideration, special concerns.”

When couples are caught, they are dealt with severely, Ruff said. “You stand them side by side. You determine what in fact has occurred. You ask them is there any doubt they were in a compromised position.” Generally, he said, once the facts are clear he metes out the maximum punishment--45 days restriction, 45 days extra duty, reduction of one pay grade and forfeiture of half of one month’s pay for two months.