Army Seeks Sweat Equity in Wake of Sex Harassment

It wasn’t the grime or the sweat of his early Army training that griped Staff Sgt. James Lipski. It was this: When he finished proving himself fit enough for the Army, he couldn’t help notice that some other soldiers seemed to have cruised through with a lot less effort.

The female recruits, he saw, could run more slowly, do fewer push-ups and sit-ups, and still pass the fitness tests that are critical to promotion--and respect--in the remorselessly physical world of the Army.

“If men and women are wearing the same green uniform, shouldn’t we meet the same standards?” asked Lipski, 34, a wiry military policeman from Long Beach, Miss.

Unchivalrous as they may sound, such complaints are at the heart of a politically charged issue that Army leaders have come to view as a key ingredient in the gender conflicts within the service.

The leadership has become increasingly convinced that the dual fitness standards have hurt male morale, and now, in the aftermath of a huge study of sexual conflicts in the ranks, leaders have decided to adjust the 12-year-old system to toughen the disputed standards for women.

But there’s a complication: The tougher fitness standards will take away an advantage women have had in entering and advancing in the Army. As a result, the changes that gratify male soldiers meet resistance from some Army women and their advocates in the civilian world, who believe that--especially in light of the service’s recent sexual harassment scandal--military women need all the breaks they can get.

The debate offers a window into the Army’s efforts to reshape its culture in the aftermath of the sex scandal, which began with the uncovering of sergeants’ abuse of trainees at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground a year ago.

And it provides insight into the leadership’s continuing struggle to deal with physical differences between men and women, an issue conservative critics say the Army would prefer to fudge, even at the risk of combat readiness.

The conflict is not a new one. Male and female Army units were combined after the Vietnam War, and the two-tiered fitness standards have been drawing complaints from men ever since.

For the most part, Army leaders overlooked the grousing, attributing it to old-fashioned attitudes they hoped would change in time. But the earth shifted in the last year as the attitudes of male troops became a focus of efforts to understand the origins of Aberdeen.

On Army posts, in Congress and elsewhere, a broad agreement developed: “Our culture is badly broken, and we need to do something about it,” said one senior Army officer.

A central question was why male soldiers who would risk their necks to help male buddies apparently wouldn’t step forward to help a woman who was harassed by other men. This indifference of male soldiers--amply documented in the criminal sex-abuse cases at Aberdeen--suggested that men saw women as a separate and lesser class of troops.

And many officers saw the fitness test as an important reason why this was so.

This view showed up last week in the exhaustive study of sexual harassment prepared for the Army by a blue-ribbon panel. The report singled out the fitness standards as a polarizing factor that demoralized women as well as men, and fed into a broader perception that women have it easier in the service.

The report’s survey of 30,000 troops found that only 50% of male soldiers said they believe that women “pull their load.” By contrast, almost all soldiers, men and women, said they believe male soldiers “pull their load.”

The young men, who are also required to have less body fat than the women, notice the different standards: Female soldiers ages 17 to 21 must do a minimum of 18 push-ups, while men are required to do 42; women have to run 2 miles in 18:54 or less, while the time limit for men is 15:54. The standard for sit-ups is almost identical, however, with women required to do 50 and the men 52.

The new standards will narrow those differences slightly, requiring women to run a little faster and do more push-ups.

Army leaders have been concerned that male soldiers are concluding “that the institution is looking at her as less than me,” the senior officer said. With that attitude, if a male soldier sees a drill sergeant mistreating a female soldier, for example, he may decide not to report it because “the Army kind of thinks of her as less anyway,” the officer said.

As the sexual harassment report notes, the male troops generally believe that the fitness standards should be identical, especially because women may be called on to do physically demanding tasks in the event of war, even if they aren’t carrying rifles.

If the standards aren’t the same, “how can you be sure that everybody would measure up?” Lipski asked.

Few women agree. And while men appear to believe that the women’s standards are too lenient, many women complain about the constant male griping that females are getting off easy.

In the survey, about 30% of the men said they believe that female soldiers “get treated better than male soldiers.” Only 9% of the women agreed. By contrast, 7% of the men said that male soldiers “get treated better than female soldiers,” and nearly 22% of the women agreed.

Male soldiers grumble “about it all the time,” said Spec. Latisha Robinson, a 22-year-old military policewoman in the same Ft. Meade battalion as Lipski.

She says many women train hard for the test “to show the men that they’re not just sliding by” with minimum scores. “They want to shut the men up.”

How much of an edge have the standards actually given women?

They have probably allowed a few to remain in the Army who otherwise would have been forced out. But the Army, always worried about meeting its recruitment goals, prefers to send people to remedial fitness classes rather than drum them out.

But the easier standards provide a bigger boost at the high end of the achievement scale, Army officials say. This is because far more women than men get the best possible scores the test allows, a fact that is noted on their regular performance records.

On the running test, for example, about 50% of female soldiers “max out” the test, compared with about 25% of men, officials say.

The Army’s view is that it can overcome the problem if it can just find a fitness formula that requires equal effort--though not results--from men and women. That’s the goal behind the new, tougher standards for women.

“As long as each gender is giving out an equal effort, then I think the morale issue will take care of itself,” said Dr. Louis Thomasi, chief research physiologist at the fitness school at Ft. Benning, Ga.

Yet women’s acceptance of the new standards may not be a sure thing.

Robinson, for instance, says she believes that the current system is justified, even though women who are clearly out of shape can easily get through it. And the sexual harassment report also notes that the great majority of women--some of whom in other ways feel the Army’s careers are unfair to them--think they deserve this separate treatment.

Some women’s advocates question the relevance of the issue.

Madeline Morris, a Duke University law professor and recent consultant to the Army, considers it “an odd solution if what you’re trying to address is a climate problem.”

The opposition of Army women and their civilian allies has already proved fatal for earlier efforts to devise new fitness standards.

In 1988, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, then the Army operations chief and later the leader of allied forces in the Persian Gulf War, ordered a new and fairer fitness plan.

After nearly three years of research and consultations, a new system was approved up and down the hierarchy and looked ready to go. But then officials of the Army nurses corps objected that it would hurt female nurses. Opposition snowballed when the Army Times newspaper published an account of the planned changes.

Overnight, the project was jettisoned by Gen. Carl Vuono, then the Army chief of staff.

The Army also twice set out to write baseline physical requirements for its 300-odd basic job categories, called military occupational specialties. But the effort died each time, with the Army citing the complexities of crafting rules for so many jobs.

But there was another factor too: Research showed that women, now eligible for most Army jobs, would have failed physical tests for 70% of the 300-plus specialties.

Lurking behind the issue for some critics is whether the Army, in its eagerness to accommodate women--and meet its recruitment goals--has gotten into a dangerous habit of fudging questions of physical differences.

Some see a laxness that could lead to casualties if the forces were rushed into a big ground war. Women are barred from jobs in infantry, artillery and armor, but they are all over the battlefield in support jobs--as pilots, medics, mechanics, truck drivers, technicians, cooks--where physical performance could be vital.

Critics say the lax attitude begins at gender-integrated basic training, where the attitudes are more lenient toward women, and for weaker men as well.

Recruits are often not required to maintain a set pace on the morning run, or complete a fixed number of push-ups in a certain period. Instead, they compete against themselves or with others deemed to be of comparable ability.

In the Navy’s boot camp, the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command, a famously unforgiving obstacle course has been renamed the “confidence course,” moved indoors and made less challenging.

Military officials deny that this is a result of the integration of women. They say it reflects the fact that today’s armed forces need relatively fewer hard-bitten infantrymen and more people who can handle machinery that challenges the mind but not the limbs. And they say other requirements, set for the individual career specialties, will weed out weaklings.

In the ranks, though, there’s clear concern about fitness and combat readiness. A recent poll by the Rand Corp. found only 57% of troops believe that their unit is ready for a crisis, a finding echoed in a new Army report.

For top Army officials, the subject of physical capacities is painfully sensitive. Sara Lister, the Army’s personnel chief, said in a recent interview in U.S. News & World Report that Army officials don’t want to publicly discuss the issues of strength differences and pregnancy among the troops because they give ammunition to conservative foes of women in the force.

In such an atmosphere, some longtime observers fear that the fitness issue may not be settled soon, even with the adjusted standards.

Says retired Lt. Col. Harry Crumling, who ran the Army’s last try to develop new standards: “I don’t think the Army’s ever going to sort this one out.”

* DISCHARGE CHALLENGED: Lieutenant fights “other than honorable” exit for adultery. A3