"If you tell a women she’s not going to do well on a test," says retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Kate Germano, "she doesn’t do well on a test." And that, says Germano, is what she saw a lot of when she reported to Parris Island, South Carolina in 2014 to take command of the U. S. military's sole women-only boot camp battalion.
Institutional expectations, says Germano, were that women would underachieve men -- even in areas where physical strength was not an issue. She worked to change that -- raising expectations.
"By changing the language that we were using to teach these women," says Germano, "and by expecting them to succeed, we saw immediate results."
Among those results: raising women recruit's marksmanship scores to record high levels. One might think her accomplishments would have been welcomed, but in a Marine Corps that at the time was pushing back against a Defense Department order to allow women into infantry units, Germano was instead relieved of command and pushed into retirement.