Men det er også det at vi blir sett på som en sånn jentegjeng, at alle bare er jenter i Saniteten - utvalgte funn fra avhandlingen The Struggle over Military Identity og konsekvenser av disse

The FFI project Research on Annual Age Cohorts aims to uncover factors that hamper and promote recruitment and retention of women and men to the Norwegian Armed Forces. This report summarizes some selected findings from the doctoral thesis The Struggle of Military Identity (Rones, 2015) and discusses the implications. The findings are selected because they are relevant to the issues investigated in Research on Annual Age Cohorts, and can be summarized in three points:

1. The selection and evaluation of officer candidates are largely based on subjective assessments of attitudes and suitability as a role model, rather than on assessment of specific skills and expertise. This entails a risk of social reproduction because such a selection is based on the candidate’s resemblance to an ideal image of the good soldier.
2. The requirement that every officer candidate needs to be a physically strong and energetic leader and winner leads to internal competition, conflicts and hierarchy struggles. At the core of the struggle are the physical test results and the competition-based selection process, which gives the Armed Forces an exclusive touch and promote the educations attractiveness. It is however not certain that the exclusivity of the education contributes to the attractiveness of later military jobs or to the retention of personnel to routine positions and functions. An exclusive identity achieved through the selection process also seemed to be more important for women than for men. This may be because all-male conscription has normalized military service for all kinds of men, while women perceive of military service as an opportunity to be “one of the guys”. Several women also expressed negative attitudes towards other women and towards the desire to increase the proportion of women in the Armed Forces. Considering the physical fitness tests, it has been claimed that women in particular want gender neutral requirements since the differentiated requirements are seen as a form of affirmative action. However, findings from interviews and surveys show that there is a minority of both women and men who are committed to equal physical requirements for the two sexes in all positions. It is argued that some women advocate equal physical requirements based on two motives: 1) as an act of recognition, and 2) as a selfinterest.
3. Obligations to obey regulation impositions and subordinate to the military rank order lead to adaption issues. Some men, in particular those who obey women in authority, seem to use bullying or harassment as a tool to reconstruct their symbolic dominance over women. The study further shows that male officer candidates in the Medical Battalion were subject to bullying by men from other battalions, who argued that medical service was a physical undemanding service well suited for girls. The men in the Medical Battalion expressed, accordingly, negative attitudes towards the high proportion of women in this service, and some of them engaged in bullying and harassment of their female colleagues.