Women's Participation in Armed Forces Cross-Nationally: Expanding Segal's Model

Abstract

In this article the authors analyse and extend Segal's theory of factors affecting women's military participation cross-nationally through a literature review on three very different countries, Australia, Mexico and Zimbabwe. These countries differ not only in geographic location, but also in how the dimensions of Segal's theory apply to each. Segal's model focuses on societal and institutional-level variables, in the military, in the culture and in the social structure that affect the degree and nature of women's participation in the armed forces. While the model fits in a general sense, the authors find that other variables need to be added, and existing ones revised. Thus, they propose an expansion of Segal's theory to include additional factors and hypotheses for the relationship between each of these variables and the extent of women's participation in a nation's armed force, using examples from Australia, Mexico and Zimbabwe.