DATE: Thursday, October 23, 1997            TAG: 9710230465

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Focus 

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   29 lines

STUDY: WOMEN FILL FEW COMBAT-RELATED JOBS

Women fill a ``very low'' number of the tens of thousands of combat-related jobs that Congress and the military's civilian leadership ordered the services to open up to them in the last several years, says a study commissioned by the Defense Department.

The study found a significant reluctance on the part of some commanders to abide by the law and allow women to fill the vacancies. It also noted that lack of training and the fact that women make up only 14 percent of the armed forces were factors contributing to the small change.

Of the 47,544 jobs that became available to women in 1993 and 1994, women fill only 815 of them, the study by RAND's National Defense Research Institute shows. The report was released Wednesday.

Local Army commanders, for instance, may require infantry experience for certain jobs that are supposed to be open to women, even though women are prohibited by law from being part of infantry units. Some commanders decide on their own to limit the number of women in certain units or they assign women to work in administrative jobs despite the fact that they are trained for other areas. KEYWORDS: WOMEN IN THE MILITARY

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu