The United States Army hit its recruiting goals last year for the first time in several years, breaking a slump worrying Pentagon brass.
The reason?
Women.
Hitting the goal was achieved via an increase in women enlisting. Almost 10,000 women enlisted for active duty in 2024, up 18 percent year over year, when male recruitment increased only 8 percent.
One of the reasons for the increased female requirement is simple:
They make better choices than men.
Women account for fewer than 30 percent of juvenile arrests and are likelier to want to pursue a college degree, making them more likely to qualify for military service and be interested in the Army. They also graduate high school at a higher rate, score better on most achievement tests, and engage in career planning at a considerably higher rate than men.
This makes the average woman a more qualified and motivated candidate than the average man.
In fact, while female enlistment has grown over the past decade, male enlistments have fallen 22 percent, from 58,000 in 2013 to 45,000 last year.
When you ever wonder why sexism continues to persist in our country, you need to only look at numbers like these as an explanation:
When women consistently outperform men in key indicators of economic and occupational success, one of the easiest ways for men to continue to compete — absent hard work, better decision-making, and long-term planning — is to maintain the structures and systems designed to undermine, oppress, denigrate, and even threaten a woman’s safety in order to maintain their unfair advantage.
Sexism is a useful tool for those men who suck at life.
It’s economically advantageous to men who can’t otherwise keep up.
This doesn’t apply to all men, of course.
Many of us are not threatened by successful, high-achieving women. We are more than willing to compete on a level playing field. We believe in equal opportunity.
Let the best person win.
But small, frightened, fragile men who are unwilling or unable to compete instead rely on sexism to maintain their edge. They can afford to be lazy, ignorant, and unambitious when half of the population is kept in check through unfair, unjust, and sometimes violent means.
These men are easy to spot, typically because of how they speak to and about women. They wear their hatred, fear, and fragility like a coat of spotlights and glitter. You can spot these little monsters from a mile away.
They need to stay a mile away.
They need to go away forever.
As an elementary school teacher, I’ve spent the last 26 years primarily in the company of women. Before that, I attended an all-women college for three years.
More than half of my corporate and business clients are also women.
Having spent so much time in their company — personally and professionally — I’m convinced that the world will be a far better place when women achieve the level of success they deserve and have rightly earned.
When the playing field is even, sexists are marginalized, and opportunity abounds, women will finally achieve the kind of success we are seeing in the Army, where an increasing number of recruits are women because they set goals, work hard, avoid jail, and are making the most of their talent.
