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Chief
No experience serving (am physically disabled, so it was never an option for me), but thank you for signing up!
Im interested in following but I just don’t think I have the discipline 🤣
I work as a civilian and I've dated a few women who were uniformed. (Not my coworkers.) What do you want to know? There's no one story. Joining as an officer and not going through the service academies, you're much less likely to be harassed or assaulted, if that's a concern. There are huge cultural differences across and within each branch. If you're going into an area with a lot of women, that's also going to be a different experience than if you're going into a recently-opened-to-women area where there is resentment and concerns about women being there.
There's a big literature on this topic, from more scholarly to less so. I liked Love My Rifle More Than You, although some of that is specific to being deployed, which, again, may not affect you.
Are you joining the Army Reserves via OCS? A lot of the bad stuff that happens because you have very young men and women who haven't been away from home before, alcohol, and huge power differentials, including women's careers being on the line should they choose to report because of senior leaders who do not create a culture of accountability around this. It's bad. But that will probably not be your experience. Not that it never is -- there are female senior officers who get harassed by generals. But it's less likely. In part because, as a reservist, the stakes are lower for you in terms of reporting it.
You'll get through bct. It's designed for you to get through it. Being in good shape is a major predictor of success, both for the obvious reasons and because you're less likely to get a musculoskeletal injury, which happens a lot with women in training.
There's also the contempt thing. There are men who think women shouldn't be in certain jobs and who resent that happening. I don't think there a lot of men who don't think women should be there, period. There's a lot of issues now around the new physical fitness test and how that's playing out for women.