Air Force’s height rule change helps women
When Alexandra Jackson joined the West Virginia Air National Guard in 2018, she was looking forward to becoming a pilot with the 167th Airlift Wing, like her father. But at 5 feet 1 inch tall, which is 3 inches shorter than the minimum standard, Jackson soon learned she would need a waiver to fly her unit’s C-17 transport plane and one of the two trainer aircraft before that.
Jackson applied for the waivers but was denied.
“It was heartbreaking, to say the least,” she said.
She then sought a different exception that sometimes is granted if pilot candidates can pass a separate measurement exam conducted in the aircraft cockpit. Her superiors in the Air National Guard had never conducted such a test for the C-17 and had to work with Air Force officials to create one. She eventually passed and recently learned she can begin officer training school next year.
Jackson was elated but also frustrated by the delay. Had the cockpit been designed to accommodate a wider range of body sizes, she would be in the final stages of training or perhaps already flying. “Hopefully I’m just paving the way for people to come,” she said.
Now, the Air Force is discarding its decades-old height standards, which have disqualified nearly half of female candidates and had a particular effect on women of color. The new standards are part of an effort to eliminate often overlooked obstacles to the advancement of women in a service whose leadership and pilot corps are overwhelmingly male.
The plans, which are in development or beginning to take effect, also include the first-ever flight suit for pregnant aircrew and a design contest for devices that would allow female aircrew to more easily urinate in flight.
Other barriers
Even as Pentagon leaders call for an end of racial and gender discrimination in the military after the upheaval that gripped the nation this summer, other barriers for female advancement persist across the Air Force and other services.
Those include a problematic record on responding to sexual harassment and assault; pregnancy bias, which a new Pentagon policy listed as a prohibited form of discrimination for the first time; and a host of smaller challenges that can make it harder for female service members to advance or that lead women to view military and family life as incompatible.
The military has taken significant steps toward eliminating the secondclass status of female service members, such as opening ground combat positions to women, said Kayla Williams, an Army veteran who directs the Military, Veterans and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Still, “having to consistently navigate a cultural environment full of implications that you do not belong and are unwanted is exhausting,” she said. “Rooting out deeply entrenched cultural norms and stereotypes will be a longer-term effort and one in which measuring success is challenging.”
Women today make up about 16 percent of U.S. military personnel but occupy few positions among the upper echelons of the Pentagon’s military and civilian workforce.
In the Air Force, a similar pattern is visible in coveted flight positions: Women account for 5 percent of pilots and just 2 percent of fighter pilots.
A recent government watchdog study found that women are more likely than men to leave the military early, with female service members saying their reasons include sexual aggression from other service members and the challenges of reconciling pregnancies and parenthood with career progression.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper has ordered officials at all levels to take rapid steps to counteract racism and discrimination.
Changes for aviators
In the Air Force, the focus on equality provided traction for a proposal that the service’s Women’s Initiative Team, an internal volunteer group, had been working on for several years. The team hoped to press Air Force leaders to modernize body size regulations that determine who is eligible to fly in different kinds of aircraft and mandate that manufacturers design aircraft for a broader array of body sizes and heights.
The so-called anthropometric standards, which dated to a survey of male pilots from 1967, have excluded 44 percent of the current U.S. female population ages 20 to 29 unless they obtain a waiver. Even with waivers, some aircraft were out of reach for most women. Only 9 percent of women, for example, qualified to fly the F-15 fighter jet.
The regulations had an even more pronounced effect on women of color, excluding 74 percent of African American women, 72 percent of Latino women and 61 percent of Asian American women in the recruitable population, Air Force officials said.
In a July 31 memo based on the WIT proposal, Will Roper, the service’s top official for acquisition and technology, instructed Air Force leaders to ensure that new aircraft and equipment are designed to be usable by 95 percent of the current recruitable population. The memo was first reported by the Air Force Times.
As an interim step until the Air Force can conduct further studies, the decision will expand the accepted range for standing height from 64 to 77 inches to 59 to 77 inches and from 34 to 40 inches to 31 to 41 inches for sitting height. The range of accepted aircrew weights is also being adjusted, providing new opportunities for women who were previously deemed too light.
Officials say the situation has been even more difficult for enlisted Air Force personnel, who are rarely granted waivers. That reality has had unintended consequences, making it harder to fill spots for enlisted linguists who sit in the back of reconnaissance aircraft. Because some linguists, highly trained in languages such as Mandarin, have been turned away for height reasons, the Air Force has had to lower language aptitude scores required for those jobs, a WIT member said.
Roper said the Air Force grew complacent about the Pentagon’s process for selecting aircrew because of its technological edge over other countries. He said the WIT’s grassroots drive to broaden the pilot candidate pool “just got stuck in the bureaucracy.”
“I do think this was unintentional, but I think it’s a case of a blind spot,” Roper said. “It is the case of having an uphill slope for women to climb to the surface, because this is that silent bias in the background.”