“We’re not talking about just the everyday person off the street who’s willing to enter these roles,” said Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, who served as an Army armor officer for nearly five years. “We’re talking about serious soldiers who want to go into combat arms and take that level of responsibility seriously.”

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Dempsey Beggs, who is running for a Congressional House seat in Virginia, was one of the first 50 women in the Army to join a combat arms unit. As a tank platoon leader at the 1st Infantry Division in 2019, Dempsey Beggs was the only woman in her company for her first six months.

To qualify as an armor officer, Dempsey Beggs said all soldiers faced the same physical tests.

“It includes picking up dummy rounds, putting them down, running with gear on, sled pulls — these things that actually measure whether you’re capable of doing that job physically and those never changed when you were first starting out,” she said. “The targets, like gunnery, are the same whether you’re a man or woman.”

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Another major misconception, Dempsey Beggs said, is the varied standards for men and women in Army-wide fitness testing. While performance standards in combat arms jobs are gender-neutral, Army-wide fitness tests have long been curved for both gender and age.

“People love to neglect the age part of that scale too — that it gets ‘easier’ as you get older,” Dempsey Beggs said.

But combat arms soldiers are held to a higher, gender-neutral standard in job-specific physical training. And women in combat arms now must meet male numbers on the Army-wide fitness test.

“People like to push that and say, ‘Oh, well, like there’s a different physical fitness standard.’ No, there’s not. There is not to be in these combat roles,” said Dempsey Beggs. “There is not a different fitness standard. And there are a lot of men serving in these roles who also cannot make this fitness standard.”

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