Female Warriors and the Right to Fight: assessing the implications of a feminised front-line

Thus far, the debate over female combat soldiers has centred on two main points of contention; women are (on average) less physically capable than men, and it is unclear what the impact of women will be on unit cohesion. Given recent political decisions in the UK and US to lift restrictions on women in combat, it is the latter issue which my project seeks to address. In order to ascertain the impact of women on group cohesion, I will observe the way
gender manifests in several distinct but comparable military institutions - elite regiments of the UK, US, and Canadian Armed Forces, the Israeli Defence Force, and all-female units of the Kurdish YPJ. In so doing, I will provide an empirical foundation to policy debates over team cohesion as well as theoretical debates over the social construction of gender. Essentially, I ask: how will the accession of women impact group cohesion in hitherto all-male fighting units? And what does this process of integration tell us about sex, gender and war-making?