The Marines did not lower the physical standards for the female officers as expected.
The opportunity for women to attend the Marines’ Infantry Officer Course experiment won’t be limited to entry-level officers for much longer. Starting this October, company-grade officers — lieutenants and captains — who have already served in another primary occupation will be allowed to raise their hands and give IOC a shot.
The move, announced Thursday in a Marine administrative message, is designed to pull more volunteers through the course as part of the Corps’ ongoing study of the possibility of opening more ground combat jobs to women. Marine officials said one goal of the three-year experiment was to have nearly 100 female officers attempt IOC after the nine-month entry-level officer training at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.; but with a little more than a year to go until the study’s conclusion, only 20 female second lieutenants have attempted the course, and none have passed.
The message also implements a new requirement for all volunteers: they must make a first-class score on the male physical fitness and combat fitness tests. For the PFT, this means they must complete a minimum of five pull-ups—assuming perfect scores of 18 minutes on the three-mile run and 100 sit-ups— to achieve an overall score of 225 or higher. Before now, female volunteers for IOC have only had to demonstrate a first-class female PFT, which does not require pull-ups.
Marine Corps officials have been contemplating this change for several months, said Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office.
“We started having a couple of female Marines coming to us and saying, ‘hey, I want an opportunity to participate in that research. I want to be part of history as well,’” she said. “We conferred with the commandant and Training and Education Command and they agreed that it would be appropriate and also be a great opportunity to get more data points.”