Local engagement and U.S. military attitudes toward gender integration: Evidence from Afghanistan

Abstract

ABSTRACT As debates on gender integration growin the military and Women, Peace, and Security scholarship, security studies scholars and policy experts are scrutinizing the link between gender and operational effectiveness. This article argues that deployed experiences create opportunities for soldiers to observe women’s engagement with host communities, particularly local women - contributing to soldiers' improved attitudes toward gender integration. Employing interviews and an online survey with a total of 43 US active duty and veterans who served in ISAF in Afghanistan, we find that most who hadserved in mixed-gender units commended female soldiers’ interactions with local populations and linked these observations with improved assessments of the operating environment. By contrast, those in male-only units report more negative views. Our study introduces an original argument to explain differences in soldiers’ attitudes toward integration, presents new empirical insights from a difficult-to-access sample and offers evidence that mixed-unit experiences matter for soldiers’ views on gender integration.