What difference does it make if there are male or female leaders?
Based on my experience, the quality of women leaders varies more than men. A few women NCO's and officers I dealt with in the Marines were top notch. Many were bitchy, catty pieces of shit though.
From the standpoint of a military commander, you have a better chance of good leadership from a man than you do a woman.
I know very little about other countries, but, the reason this is so in the US military is that, it is quite a straightforward process to identify a man, who you think is unfit for promotion into a position of higher authority, and eliminate him from contention and never have worry if you will be challenged to support your assessment. It happens often, although probably not often enough. However, if you deny a promotion to a seemingly qualified woman there is much more documentation to submit with the EREC evaluation (Army, don't know the Marine equivalent. I photographed the local EREC's needs for three years, before they closed Fort Harrison. I got to know a couple of officers, stationed on post.), just to cover your own ass and not be called on for unfair treatment of female officers.
Having to answer for an appeal of one of your decisions may result in having a decision you made overturned by an angry woman who outranks you. That would be bad enough, for you, but in a time of recruiting only from a volunteer pool, the public image must remain "spotless" and having a bunch of women running around saying they were skipped over for promotion would look really bad. They have to prevent that at all costs. The female officers files were almost always two boxes instead of just one, half full, from all the extra documentation that was teid to her career. The climate of thinking in the military brass, against the public perceiveing any lack of support for female officers, especially, has made the possibility of an unqualified female officer, "manning" a post, much more likely than it would have been if all officers, of either gender, were truly treated equally. Unfortunate, but that's the way it was explained to me by a full bird, I worked with.
... but you guys are full of shit, if you think women don't like guns or that women are afraid of them. There are enough women with guns, just under the Texas star, to offset your position on Europe, I would bet. I believe the difference in many European people is from a little leftover brainwashing by various dictators, over the years. At least that makes more sense than some idea that feminization of a government, which has no gender, is the cause of people giving up freedoms, so readily.
