A physical fitness test hailed by the Army as gender-neutral has produced, according to documents obtained by Democrat senators, a 65 percent fail rate for women and a 10 percent fail rate for men.
Conclusion: Gender neutrality isn’t woke enough.
In proof that nothing will convince some liberals that there are physical differences between the genders and that this could have consequences for military readiness, Task & Purpose reported last month the military is considering changes to the Army Combat Fitness Test, unveiled just three years ago, that would score individuals by gender percentile instead of against the entire field.
The ACFT was designed to replace the decades-old Army Physical Fitness Test, according to Stars and Stripes, which included age and gender in scoring. That was supposed to make it more gender-neutral while still better preparing troops for the physical demands of the battlefield.
There are six events in the ACFT: A deadlift, a standing power throw (tossing a medicine ball behind you), hand-release push-ups, a shuttle run in which weight must be dragged, a leg-tuck test and a two-mile run.
An individual’s performance in the test wasn’t going to be used as part of the process in deciding promotions until mid-2022, according to Stars and Stripes. However, Congress ordered the Army to stop administering the test until it could be reviewed in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which became law on Jan. 1 over then-President Donald Trump’s veto.
Now, slides describing “ACFT 3.0” have leaked on social media and were obtained by Task & Purpose. While Army brass had said that there would be adjustments to the ACFT over the next few years, the direction of the test seems to be going from gender-neutral to readiness-irrelevant.
Among the proposed changes in the “pre-decisional” slides are, according to Task & Purpose, “eliminating competition between genders and scoring men and women in percentiles of their gender. Another proposal includes removing numerical fitness test scores from soldiers’ files for promotion boards in favor of color codes symbolizing their percentile in an effort to remove bias.”
“We know there is a physiological difference between men and women,” one slide said.
