Great Britain’s army used to have a sexually segregated training regimen — men and women were held to different physical requirements for strength and other conditioning. The problem was that it turned out many of the women were leaving their basic training without the conditioning necessary to accomplish the tasks they were required to do.
In 1998, the army switched to a policy where the training and physical requirements are identical for both men and women. One of the results of that is apparently an increase in the number of injuries among women.
The BBC reported in early January about a study by Lt. Col. Ian Gemmell, an army occupational physician, about injury rates in the old and new regimens. Under the so-called ‘gender fair’ policy, where women trained by themselves and were not expected to meet the same physical fitness as men, the proportion of women discharged do to injuries such as stress fractures, tendonitis and pack pain was about 4.5 percent.
In the 2 years after the ‘gender free’ principle in which women trained alongside men and were required to meet the same physical fitness levels, the proportion of such medical discharges rose to 11 percent.
The main reason is that biological differences make women, on average, more susceptible to such training injuries. The lower muscle mass on average increases stress on the skeleton of women, women tend to emulate men’s generally longer stride in marching, etc. This sort of phenomenon is also seen in injury rates among women athletes, who are generally far more prone to these sort of injuries than are male athletes.
Source:
Army training ‘too tough for women’. The BBC, January 3, 2002.