One area of focus has been PTSD among women. "Women are into almost all jobs, and at every rank, so it's a lot harder to operate without them," says Lory Manning, who directs the Women in the Military Project for the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C. In addition, out of the 1.6 million service members who have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, more than 200,000 were women. active-duty force, a number that's grown from 2 percent in 1973. ![]() According to the latest data available from the Defense Manpower Data Center, as of September 2008, women made up 14 percent of the U.S. Women have served in all the nation's wars, but today make up a larger percentage of the service than in previous conflicts. "It really informs us about the type of treatment programs we need to create," Street says. Ultimately, understanding those differences should help researchers and practitioners design effective interventions for both men and women. The research is continuing, both to understand the prevalence of sexual assault among women serving and to determine whether exposure to combat affects men and women differently, says Amy Street, PhD, a researcher with the Department of Veterans Affairs. And on a more hopeful note, psychological research finds that female soldiers in combat may be more resilient to its effects than male soldiers. The emerging psychological research presents a mixed and still incomplete picture, but has yielded some interesting findings.įor one, psychologists have found that women who experienced sexual harassment or trauma before or during their military service are more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder than those who were not sexually traumatized. With more American women fighting-and dying-for their country than ever before, psychologists are exploring how they may fare differently from their male counterparts.
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