Marine experiment finds women get injured more frequently | Hacker News Reader

Marine experiment finds women get injured more frequently

washingtonpost.com

26 pointsjriot41 comments

To some extent, this is not surprising. However, the conclusions that are going to be drawn from the evidence are pretty unsubstantiated.

Women and men have different physiologies, particularly in terms of how the typical "average" build works out and in terms of the configuration of hips. The finding that women are going to have more hip injuries than men should not consequently be surprising, and other injuries relating to, for example, carrying more than they should be carrying, being relatively higher in women is also to be expected.

However, the problem is that the methodology ends up being poor. People advocating for integration of women into the infantry or other physically intensive jobs are not expecting to use different physical fitness criterion for women and men for these jobs, so comparing average women to average men is not the appropriate metric to be evaluating them.

What would you do differently than the Marines experiment? What's the appropriate metric?

I don't really see a better way than measuring task performance.

Mixed sex units are a worst case for a women. Sure carrying gear designed for larger men causes more injuries for women. Sure dragging men is harder on a smaller women. Sure being accurate with a heavier gun (designed for a man) is harder.

But how about comparing male units with female units. Women are smaller, take less resources, can fit in smaller spaces, are easier to carry, etc. A truck/plane/boat/whatever can carry more women, and you need less food for each one.

I suspect women given the chance could cause problems for the male competition. Less ego, less er, male. Try some wargames between males vs females. Evaluate their strategy, handling stress, etc. If men are as bad as guessing women's strategy as they at predicting women's feelings they are in for a very hard time indeed. I've heard that men have a substantial advantage in a marathon, but are completely wasted at the end. Women take longer to get to the finish line, but are not nearly as decimated by it.

I seem to recall that NASA did a study and came to the conclusion that women were better suited for space. Just as smart, somewhat smaller, more finger dexterity, and consumed less water, oxygen, and food. This led to a rather unpopular conclusion that most astronauts should be female.

So sure, if your metric is bigger/stronger = better then yes men win every time.

Women also feel pain more strongly than men and have a lower tolerance for it:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215461...

I was told in high school that the opposite was true, because of childbirth.

Don't think there would be much evolutionary pressure to have less pain during childbirth but feeling less pain when injured during hunting (a historically male activity) would certainly be useful and I could see it being selected for.

I heard that women are more stoical with visceral pain and men cope better with "exterior" pain. This makes sense but I've no idea if it's really true.

It's not clear how people can die from pain itself in childbirth, directly or indirectly, so I don't see how that could be selected for.

People can die indirectly from pain on the battlefield or while hunting, because it leaves you vulnerable to being killed while you're distracted by it. So there's definitely an adaptive advantage for men to develop pain resistance.

People die from pain-induced shock [1] all the time. I think the essential mechanism is that pain changes your heart rate and blood pressure. Small doses increase both, but large doses decrease both. A large enough dose can make your heart rate and blood pressure drop enough to cause shock.

[1] https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Neurogenic_shock

If you ask "what did men evolve to do that women didn't?", math, politics, philosophy and engineering would be wrong answers, because for most of human history (and all preindustrial history) only a tiny fraction of people did those things, and in some societies they were women. By contrast, war is fundamentally human -- it has been with us for as long as records are available, and societies often conscripted large fractions of the population -- and historically it was almost entirely performed by men. The only more masculine activity than war is peeing while standing up.

> “It has been scientifically proven that overall physical fitness — not gender — correlates to injury,”

I think the takeaway should be how do we reduce injury with respect to different body types

I disagree.

I see it more as natural selection. Training is usually what a soldier might have to go through in real combat. I don't think accommodating different body types will be useful when the war time environment selects for a particular fit, and those not adapted to it will not survive, or worse - be a burden to the lives of others.

Sure, we can do things to reduce injury for people of different body types, but it would make more sense to me to select for those who already have a particular fitness.

when I say fit, I mean fit to the environment, not necessarily physical fitness.

I'd be curious to read that study as it seems to contradict the article. I didn't see it sourced in the article.

Note that the date on the article is 10 September 10 2015.

It’s a shame they didn’t have an arm of the study looking at female-only units. As it is, they are comparing men-only with mixed units, so there is no way to determine how much of the effect is due to being in a mixed vs single gender unit. I recall in England that women did better academically in single-sex schools than they did in mixed schools. It’s conceivable the same might (or might not) be true here.

Of course, they also need to ensure equivalent levels of fitness and experience, which doesn’t seem to have been the case here.

There wouldn’t be a critical number of women required to create a standard Marine rifle platoon.

You’re essentially talking of 3 squads of 12+ people/squad. Never mind a supporting platoon of weapons(machine guns/mortars/assault) which is 40+ members.

So on a good day you’re talking of maybe 50 seriously jacked women (just to compare to an average male) that has to choose to become part of the infantry.

Do you know how you hear “there are no devs anywhere! Lol zomg “ well, this actually applies to the military in general. Never mind finding super jacked women who are choosing to go to the military, then pick the infantry, then pick the Marines.

So out of all that, as a young woman going to the military,why would I go do infantry and be miserable in water/desert, no showers for weeks on end, carrying heavy equipment for miles.... or I could get the same pay and be promoted faster as a clerk/accounting/cook/driver.

Israel is able to have some women sniper platoons (who are pretty hot) because they require mandatory service.

Source: Marine and yes I’ve seen the female IDF

Edit: English

didn't bother to read the article, but is it perhaps partly due to the fact that women are more likely to report their injuries compared to men? There can be a lot of pressure on men to just "suck it up" and not report injuries.

The breakdown of incidence reports strongly suggests that the cause is entirely predictable: loading up individuals to carry more than they can carry in good health, which is going to affect women (which are disproportionately smaller and less massive) more than men. The study made no attempt to control for that, which is quite frankly irresponsible.

Don't you have to carry the same amount of equipment, and thus equal weight, as a soldier of any gender?

Yes. As I mentioned in another comment, however, pretty much everyone who wants to expand these sorts of positions to women expect that they would be held to the same standards (e.g., fitness requirements) that men in these positions, while the study itself drew from women based only on the current fitness standards, which are easier for women than men.

The Israel army is famous for both the high rate of permanent injury of women during training, and for refusing to admit it, a la James Damore: https://youtu.be/iUSFF4NI_Us

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