This isnt’ it.

Marines: Most Female Recruits Don’t Meet New Pullup Standard

Starting Jan. 1, every woman in the Marines Corps was supposed to meet a new physical standard by performing three pullups. But that has been put off.

The Marine Corps announced it quietly. There was no news conference — just a notice on and an item on its own TV show, .

Lance Cpl. Ally Beiswanger explained that the pullup test had been put off until sometime next year, to gather more data and “ensure all female Marines are given the best opportunity to succeed.”

We’re constantly told that women can do any job that a man can do. Yet, we constantly see courts, legislatures, and bureaucrats force changes in job requirements so that members of a protected class can “be equal and succeed”.

It’s not just the military. Requirements for women in police, fire, and EMS jobs have been changed so that candidates who lack upper body strength or stamina can pass physical ability tests and get hired.

These changes are not without cost. In EMS I’ve seen first hand that additional units are often sent when the primary unit has a woman on it that can’t lift patients. That just ties up more units and costs money. I’d imagine that similar things happen in the police realm as well.

Then there is the increased likelihood of injury. Not only for the woman involved, but for their partners, male and female.

Most of all, it’s unfair to lower the standards for women in jobs that require a degree of physical strength. Most of all, it’s unfair to the women who can and do compete on an equal footing. I’ve worked with a lot of women over the years that met and exceeded the physical requirements for an EMS job. Not one of them ever whined about the standards being unfair. Nor did they try to get them changed. What they did was what they needed to do to meet those standards and be successful in EMS on an equal footing with big, burly men. It’s also unfair to men. Management that will quail at the prospect of firing a female candidate because she can’t lift her end of the stair chair have no hesitancy in firing men who can’t.

If we want to have work place equality, then it has to be just that. We should set a standard based on the requirements of a job and then hold every candidate to those standards. Male, female, race, none of that should matter.

If nothing else, we owe it to the people who depend on us.