The army discovers there is a difference between male and female anatomy.

[FannyCann]

Looks like the army are discovering there is a difference between male and female anatomy. As so often, it will be the compensation cases that make them sit up and acknowledge the problem.

Female Army recruits suffer injuries from battle kit designed for men

mol.im/a/7464293

Wombat - I can imagine you'd be over the moon. The issue is whether you're expected to pay for it! (I don't know if this is still the case, but last newspaper article I read on this said service personnel were being expected to find the whole cost of decent boots themselves).

"The police have found there is a real difference when it comes to body armour. Female officers sometimes went without rather than suffer the constant pain of the smaller size, or the impracical looseness of the larger, until they finally got some tailored for them."

This is a physics problem. Curved plates do not have the stopping power that straight ones do. It would be utterly unacceptable to offer women kit with inferior ballistic protection.

After all, if you needed billet protection, would you choose the best stopping power, which might chafe, or one that won't but doesn't work so well?

(Though the real issue is the better Scandi kit - women still wear make pattern, but performance is better than that chosen by other allies)

"last newspaper article I read on this said service personnel were being expected to find the whole cost of decent boots themselves"

Yes and no. Boots are key kit. Issue ones have improved enormously over the last couple of decades. But yes, people (regardless of sex/gender) might choose to buy their own, if there are features/fit they want not available in the various issue ones.

''Twas ever thus!

Barbara I think it depends on the individual’s situation and how much damage the boots are causing. It was 8 years ago that I had to buy my own boots. If I’d have had issued boots that actually fit properly, then I might not have had any issues with my feet! Probably wasn’t the type of boots that were the problem.
My DH is still serving, and as he has collapsed arches, certain types of boot make it painful for him to carry out certain duties. So he had to go to the med centre, get his feet looked at by the dr and have the doctor provide the relevant paperwork for the people in the stores to say “yes. Give him whatever boots he needs that won’t mash his feet to a pulp”.
It would seem it’s much easier these days to either have the boots you need issued to you from the off, or be reimbursed for the full or partial cost of buying your own

This is a physics problem. Curved plates do not have the stopping power that straight ones do. It would be utterly unacceptable to offer women kit with inferior ballistic protection.

Source for this assertion?

(NB, I am a physicist, and one with an interest in armour - both ancient and modern...)

This has been an ongoing issue with the military and I'm sure we will see new cases with the relatively recent changes. I believe it was the RAF who not all that long ago was sued for their drill practices and the impact it had on female pelvises.

@CherryPavlova anyone in the army is a soldier first, it doesn't matter what their duty is there is a bare minimum they're expected to be trained to due to the nature of deployments. Ask any medic who was out in Afghan and I'd be surprised if they weren't in a situation where they didn't need to hold a serious amount of kit, even though we are in relatively peaceful times they are trained for war.

pimbee indeed it was.
Drill movements are choreographed to work with the average man’s 30-inch marching pace. The average size woman marches with a 28-inch pace. So the argument was that within mixed parades, the female’s pace should be accommodated to prevent injury.
But in all honesty, having been part of plenty of mixed parades, and being something of a hobbit myself (5’4” with size 4 feet), dealing with having to take a slightly bigger than comfortable stride for a couple of hours isn’t that much of a mean feat

I was offered "female" boots last year for the first time in my career. They do for better but I have a mix of ones I've been issued & ones I've bought myself and I wear them depending on what I'm doing & where it is. In the desert I'll always wear my own, tabbing in the UK & it's issued Altbergs.

My issue is that "mens" is the default clothing and it just doesn't work. If the army is serious about its 10-15% women, it could at least remove that phrase from the clothing labels! "Shirt combat mens" irritates me probably more than it should!!

DS1 has been in the army 5 years. He's got stress injuries to the muscles and bones to his lower legs. At this point last year there was talk of his career ending. His injuries are a direct result of tabbing in his boots, probably the issue ones from basic training because he'd bought newer ones since.

On the advice of the senior health care professionals at the new defence rehabilitation unit he's got new boots and is back to full duties. Unfortunately the MOD has a track record of waiting for the problems to arise before addressing the issues. DH's feet are knackered because for years they didn't make RAF shoes big enough for him.

@ThePolishWombat I have to admit I didn't understand what the issue was it seemed a bit OTT to me but then not something I've had to do myself so can't judge! Seemed a very typical RAF thing to do though ha, they're always the more cautious service!

pimbee in all honesty, it was laughable.

@Genvonklinkerhoffen all labelled “men’s”.....until you get issued your absolutely stunning number 2’s and then it would appear that the MOD believe every woman to be a perfect cuboid shape So you end up in a skirt that looks like it will only fit properly if you are Quentin Blake’s vision of Ms Trunchbull

Exhibit A:

If genuinely expert, then you will know that genre curve for ballistic plate is fine, but not bust-accommodating curve (assuming there couid even be such a thing as a standard protectible bust) at higher levels such as 7 and 8.

Stab vests and lower protection would be OK, of course, including those adopted by the police

This id standard make as default with women trying to get on with stuff that is not designed for them, then when they find it hard, men say, see they aren't cut out for it.

This is not news to the army they had all this afew years back with women being injured.

The police thing is interesting. Women go without body armour as the equipment is so painful. A poster describes this as a little chafing, says its impossible to make body armour that will fit women, and wouldn't anyone rather have a little chafing than less protection. Ignoring that the women are going without completely.

A lot of this with cars. Crash test dummies and safety design for men, women enormously more likely to be killed or seriously injured. There were posters saying yes well what can you do?

The male as default and women should just put up and shut up is entrenched.

We had a similar issue in the USAF with women fighter pilots. The ejection seats for the jets were originally designed for the average weight male. It has to be powerful enough to eject the pilot clear of the jet so they can parachute to safety. Unfortunately, that meant it was also powerful enough to snap a female pilots spine. (Oops). So we had minimum height/weight requirements that excluded all but the largest women.
But then I got to help design, test and deploy fighter jet upgrades that included seat weight sensors and adjustable pyrotechnics in the seat ejectors and now we can have any sized pilot a fighter jet. While we were at it, we also improved the canopy pyrotechnics...
When a pilot ejects, the canopy has to be blasted off first otherwise the pilot ejects into the canopy and is squashed like a bug on a windscreen. Anyway, they had a high risk of the canopy not ejecting before the seat due to old technology and we fixed that too.
This was in the 1990s

Now our top test pilots are women! (USAF and Navy)

All I’m saying, is that armed forces do need to change equipment and weapons system up for both men and women to use but it is totally do-able.

Women don't need curvy superhero big tit shaped armour ffs.

It's male gaze design response.

No personal experience with this, but know via grapevine that US Army has also made changes to sniper rifles to better accommodate women snipers. Anyway, they actually have different stocks, different scopes and so on made to suit the female arm length, torso shape and cheek to eye distance. The rifle barrel and butt are also weighted and balanced differently because women actually do better with a slightly heavier weighted butt because it absorbs the recoil. So men and women snipers issued the same rifle actually get a customized version of said rifle designed to fit their biology better.

Ah, I read about this earlier on the DM (shame yes), the overwhelming response was that it showed women should not be on the frontline as they were not capable.
Not- give them the right kit and then see if they were capable.
Typical response unfortunately.
Give the females kit that is not suitable and then just wait for them to fail....

@ThePolishWombat holy fuck. I have "outgrown" my FAD. Went to get new ones & the tailor said "we will need to look at the skirt because the person who designed these has never seen a woman". Hilarious. Trunchbull is absolutely right.

@Genvonklinkerhoffen
I don’t know if the rules are different or if the RAF simply don’t give much of a fuck, but some of the women I see strolling around my DH’s camp in their impeccably tailored blues, that actually fit, and they look like a woman do fill me with jealousy A lot of them look like their uniform was actually made to measure it’s tailored that nicely to their individual shape.....rather than what I used to look like: ie a cube, draped in itchy material with the flattering hue of human shit, tied up in the middle with a shiny buckle

If genuinely expert, then you will know that genre curve for ballistic plate is fine, but not bust-accommodating curve (assuming there couid even be such a thing as a standard protectible bust) at higher levels such as 7 and 8.

As Fraggling says, no-one's suggesting ludicrous comic book "boob plate" armour (there are some hilarious discussions online as to whether that would actually channel the arrows into your cleavage, thus proving counterproductive), merely armour that actually fits.

For comedy value:
www.tor.com/2013/05/06/boob-plate-armor-would-kill-you/

An answer (admittedly from Reddit, but with a few genuine historical references to chase up) which is rather more informative.
www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4q9pmt/was_boob_armour_ever_a_real_thing/

After all, in case you hadn't noticed, men's torsos are also curved. It's simply a case of a bit more space round the breast area to tuck them away neatly without squashing them, a slightly shorter back, and waist in the right place. No-one's suggesting you ought to send female troops onto the battlefield looking like Red Sonja. Merely that putting them into body armour for a 6'2" bloke probably isn't going to be very helpful.

And look - lo and behold, a professional company supplying just such armour. And not a hint of barbie doll tit outlines anywhere, just stuff that actually fits.
www.safeguardarmor.com/fempro-body-armor/

That's fascinating about ejector seats Dr Allcome.

Makes sense - I took DS to do some via ferratas in Italy a few years back, and discovered (researching it beforehand) children can't use standard via ferrata slings because they don't weigh enough to deploy the shock-absorbing stitching - so an adult set would simply behave like a static sling instead. I kept DS on a top rope instead, with ordinary slings just to stop him penduluming. Same sort of thing, just coming at it from the opposite end.

(What happens if you drop 80kg on ordinary slings verus proper via ferrata kit... Ouch...

)

Nothing to add, but thanks to all for a really informative thread

Wombat - i was in the army a long time before you and there were a great deal less fucks given for us back then so I'm glad it seems to be improving (for the men too).

At one point i had a pair of the old driver boots which had actually been phased out for newer recruits (what can I say, i knew people ) which were really comfortable but no good for assault courses. I loved my DMS boots but the combat boots were awful. Lucky me got on a trial for goretex boots and they were great.

As for carrying stuff - back then we didn't have to do the CFT but we were very few women in our camp so we were forced to. Some were lucky and got in a squad that redistributed some of our pack weight, others were literally dragged round by the back of their webbing.

Actually i tell a lie. Back then women did press-ups with our knees on the ground because boobs or something. But that was it.