Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way!

I have been watching and reading the debate on women in combat for about a week now, since it first piqued my attention on the morning news here, where the only coverage was of how women should NOT be allowed in combat. There is no faster way to rivet me than to tell me that my gender makes me incapable of doing something.
I have listened to all the arguments and several bloggers have made very valid and credible points, so I am not going to rehash every argument under the sun. Instead I am going to focus on two arguments: one that even most women shy away from (i.e. strength) and the other incompetence.

On Strength
Most women will concede women are weaker than men and there is evidence to support that women have less muscle mass than men and that we carry more fat. I am not sure that this translates into women are weaker, particularly when the people making the argument say things like: a woman can't carry the same load as a man.
I take personal issue with this. You see, I am in a male-dominated profession. But it isn't any male dominated profession, it's geology: the science of hauling your lab equipment on your back to some remote place that doesn't have a road, often has a slope of greater than 30 degrees and an elevation of over 5000', a place so remote, where you carry a shotgun to fend off polar bears, or hell grizzly bears, sometimes in a country so god-forsaken you know you are taking your life in you hands going there. We get blistering heat in deserts so devoid of water you have to pack it in with you. We work in bone freezing cold in Antarctica (the link is a slide show) and above the Arctic circle. We face rogue waves on research cruises in the N. Atlantic. You name it, there is a geologist who has done it.
This is not a profession where you can had a guy your pack, your hammer (sledge or rock), you shotgun, or any other piece of equipment to a man and ask him to carry it. I have backpacked for days with more than 100 lbs on my back, and unlike traditional backpackers my pack gets heavier with time as I add new samples to it. It's not as bad as one might imagine. It's a matter of training. And if you can imagine, I did a lot of rock climbing before my breast reduction (from a 38H), which meant that the majority of my body could never cling as closely to the rock face as a man or even a regular woman, meaning I had to be a lot stronger.
Did I start out as a geologist being able to do all these things? No, but most people in our classes who weren't ex-military couldn't either. We learned together on weekend and summer field courses how to pack better, stride better on uneven terrain, catch and kill food and prepare it, avoid danger and rescue one another.
Now you might say, well, Smurfette you are kind of built like a tree. Most women have smaller bones and are thinner than you. I would argue that this makes no difference. When I was in Costa Rica doing field work with my advisor who probably weighs slightly more than Unlikely Wife and is slightly taller, she ran circles around me in the field and she was pregnant at the time. I mean she was flying up and down the side of that volcano like a bat out of hell. And then there is my friend Heather, who is the size of Unlikely Wife in every way and she isn't a geologist. She's a chemist. She's ridiculously strong and she's a crack shot. And there's the chic on the Insanity fit test, and she beats the pants off the male marathon runner on the fit test. Shaun T's take: "Insanity isn't sexist."
Shaun T is right. Fitness isn't sexist. Our conceptualization of what women are capable of is. Women make up over 50% of all undergrad degrees in geology, which means that they all went through field camp like I did and that they can do what I have done and do now. Strength is, to a large extent, a matter of training your mind and body.

On Incompetence
Ah, sexism, how familiar you are to me. I have heard this about women for ages in the sciences. It's the justification for why most women (even though we get the majority of PhDs in science) don't apply for/get tenure. It's BS.
Women are intellectually capable of anything a man is. There are a zillion studies to prove this. If you would like references, please leave me a comment and I will send them to you. The most recent study showed that if women and minorities were given time before sitting for a physics exam (where there are typically large achievement gaps) to write about positive outcomes to the exam it caused the achievement gap to disappear. Why? The achievement gaps are largely cultural and ingrained in your brain from hearing you aren't good enough to do something. Senior Jefe has been telling me about some of the talks being given about these issues by the Admiralty at school right now. They are largely in agreement that it is the culture of the military community that is affecting readiness. We still have COs (one relieved recently) who were openly sexist toward his female officers on board. It was so bad that when he was relieved of duty, the crew burst into tears for joy. I think that if men and women in the military are told over and over and over that women are incompetent, they will get the result they are looking for to a certain extent.
It takes a really hard person to have someone tell them "all women are incompetent" over and over and not internalize it. I have seen women who succumbed to that in my field. The ones who are successful think about quitting everyday until they get to a point where they want to grind the person saying it into the ground.
That's where I ended up. A professor in undergrad pulled the kind of crap going on in the military today on women in our department over and over. He pulled me aside one day and told me I would never get a PhD; I just wasn't good enough. It was a bad day and I lost it (though not in the way you might think) and I looked him straight in the eye and told him he was going to have to take it from me. He tried. He lost. I can't wait to send him a graduation card here in a year and a half and a copy of the paper where he wrote at the top that I should find another field. Women like me pave the way for other women to live and work in an environment where those types of behaviors are no longer acceptable, because they have been proven wrong. (And if you can believe it, the stories previous generations of female geologists tell make my experiences seem totally lame) The first women in combat MOS will have to be hard as steel and unflinching in the face of severe persecution by SOME men who have internalized anachronistic messages about women.
There will be a day though where we will all look back and laugh at the fact that this was ever even an issue. Until then, I would really encourage women at least to do the rest of us a favor:
Support equality for women in every aspect or not, it's your choice. Just do those of us who choose to be the equals of men a favor and stay out of our way. It's hard enough when men tell you you aren't good enough and harass you. When women do it, it is so much more offensive.
It really boils down to: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way!"