January 10, 2020: The 1990's saw women beginning to fill a wider range of roles in the military, with many countries relaxing their bans on women serving in combat roles. As a result, women are able to fly combat aircraft, serve in artillery units, staff missile emplacements, serve as combat medics, and fill various other roles that involve potential combat exposure. In this article women who have been on the front lines discuss their varying experiences.

All acknowledged that the system demanded that they become more masculine. Most expressed a certain tension between the desire to meet this expectation, on the one hand, and a resistance to it, on the other. Women in the military are confronted with both formal structural barriers and non-formal barriers in the form of various exclusion mechanisms that are difficult to expose and change.

Read more: Women on the Front Lines: Military Service, Combat and Gender (blog.oup.com)