Friday, October 9, 2009

gender inequity affects gay women also...

Women in the military are disproportionately dismissed based on the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Considering the paucity of women in the military, the skew is even more shocking - the numbers I found (from 2003) show that in the Air Force there are 368,000 members, 71,000 of whom are women. Now, if 56 women and 34 men were dismissed based on sexual orientation, for a rough figure, that is 0.0789% of women dismissed and 0.0114% of men dismissed; quite a difference.

I wonder what the proportion of gay to strait soldiers is, but we cannot really get that number, could we, because they'd all be dismissed. Ridiculous. It is utterly absurd that the US military, still, will not allow soldiers to be open about their sexuality without fear of dismissal.

1 comment:

Mike Russo said...

Is it just me, or do other people not understand what the connection is between the military and being gay? How are the two related at all!? Why the hell should it matter what sexual orientation you are? If you want to defend the country, you should be allowed to do it. Done! Now lets move on as a society to some issues that are more pressing.