Can sexual harassment, sexual discrimination, and other obstacles be used to justify why women make up less than 10% of special operations forces?
Some service policies concerning occurrences of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in collaborative settings are not in line with DOD regulations. According to DOD policies, complaints of harassment and discrimination in joint situations must be handled by the service of the complainant. Data on SOCOM’s personnel, including instances of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, is not always timely, accurate, or complete. Even though SOCOM has made some progress toward resolving its data access issues, the department has not yet created a cooperative procedure to guarantee SOCOM has access to data kept in multiple offices of the Secretary of Defense and military service databases.
