Summary: The military services are using various approaches to integrate men and women during basic training. These approaches range from using the same program to instruct both sexes and integrating some training units to using different programs of instruction and providing separate training. The costs associated with gender integration have been low. In fact, the Army is the only service that has incurred expenses to accommodate gender-integrated basic training, spending about $67,000 to modify barracks. No staffing or curriculum changes have been made to accommodate integrated basic training. Studies of the impact of gender-integrated units have been done for the Navy and the Army. A 1993 study done for the Navy reported no impact on objective performance measures and improvement in teamwork measures for both men and women training in gender-integrated units. A recent Army study found that the performance of women improved in gender-integrated training units while the performance of men was not degraded. Although the Army introduced limited gender-integrated basic training in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Army has no records from that period to compare with its current program.
