Commentary: Everyday Essentialism and Women’s Experiences in Armed Forces

Abstract

This commentary is a response to two articles published on the 2025 OnlineFirst pages of Armed Forces & Society: “Women in the Military: Navigating Through Female Life Stages and Military Career by ‘Acting Normally’” by Nadia Diacone, Elena Bendien, Eva van Baarle, and Petra Verdonk; and “When Professionalism Is Not Enough: On Public Discourse Regarding Women’s Combat Service in Israel—the Case of Iron Swords (2023–2025)” by Elisheva Rosman and Itamar Rickover. The two articles make important points about the persistence of everyday essentialist gender stereotypes that affect the culture of military organizations, the experiences of female military personnel, and public attitudes toward women in state armed forces. We argue that the two articles also contain findings which challenge the literature on war as a catalyst for women’s empowerment, and that academic and policy-making communities should pay closer attention to these findings that make us question the transformative potential of war.

In their 2025 article “Women in the Military: Navigating Through Female Life Stages and Military Career by ‘Acting Normally,’” Nadia Diacone, Elena Bendien, Eva van Baarle, and Petra Verdonk draw on 20 interviews with military women and women veterans of the Netherlands Armed Forces (NAF), to illustrate how these women adjusted to the military’s masculine norms during female-specific life stages (menstruation, maternity, and menopause). Their findings highlight how women in the NAF navigate “a masculine-typed organization” (Diacone et al., 2025, p. 2) that is dominated by male bodies and affected by persistent gender stereotypes which equate men and masculinities with (physical) strength, power, and authority, and women and femininities with weakness, passivity, and subordination (see also Coulter, 2008; Runyan and Peterson, 2014). The women interviewed by Diacone et al. had to conform not only to military rules but also to norms of masculinity within the NAF, which led them to “hide bodily processes such as menstrual cycles” (Diacone et al., 2025, p. 15); “overperform” (Diacone et al., 2025, p. 15) to prove their worth; and silence themselves by not speaking up about how gender inequalities and power asymmetries within the military are affecting them.

Elisheva Rosman and Itamar Rickover—in their 2025 article “When Professionalism Is Not Enough: On Public Discourse Regarding Women’s Combat Service in Israel—the Case of Iron Swords (2023-2025)”—similarly highlight the persistence of gender stereotypes, but by focusing on public perceptions of, rather than women’s experiences in, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Using content analysis of mainstream and sectarian media items, official government statements, and survey data published between October 2023 and January 2025, Rosman and Rickover find that, in the months after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack, “the IDF was genuinely interested in bolstering the participation of women in combat” (Rosman & Rickover, 2025, p. 10). Neither public opinion nor government policy in Israel, however, has “significantly shifted in favour of expanded combat roles [for women]” (Rosman & Rickover, 2025, p. 1) and also the IDF “backpedaled” (Rosman & Rickover, 2025, p. 10) on its original stance as time and the war in Israel-Palestine went on. According to Rosman and Rickover (2025), this lack of consistent support for female combat soldiers is not so much rooted in concerns about combat performance or women’s battle professionalism. Rather, they find that discourse regarding women’s combat service is dominated by “social and political considerations” (Rosman and Rickover, 2025, p. 1)—meaning that attitudes toward female combat soldiers in the IDF seem to be less about women’s actual combat skills and more about views on gender roles more broadly.

Although they do not label it explicitly as such, both articles—by Rosman and Rickover (2025) and Diacone et al. (2025)—highlight the relevance of everyday essentialism in the military and in society.

Everyday Essentialism

Everyday essentialism—also known as everyday primordialism when applied to the study of ethnic identity (Demmers, 2012; Fearon & Laitin, 2000)—is a constructivist concept that describes how “people often believe, mistakenly, that certain social categories are natural, inevitable, and unchanging facts about the social world” (Fearon & Laitin, 2000, p. 848). In a nutshell, everyday essentialism points to a disconnect between academic findings on one hand, and people’s everyday beliefs outside of academic debates on the other: In academic studies, it is by now widely accepted that social categories such as gender, race, and ethnicity are socially constructed, meaning that they are created, maintained, or changed through human discourse and behavior, making them context-dependent and open to political manipulation (e.g., Diacone et al., 2025; Runyan and Peterson, 2014; Smedley & Smedley, 2005; Varshney, 2007). In people’s daily lives “on the ground” (Demmers, 2012, p. 24), however, beliefs about the “naturalness” of identities such as gender or ethnicity tend to persist, with those who hold everyday essentialist views typically believing that it is biology rather than human actions that shapes the content and boundary rules of social categories (Demmers, 2012; Fearon & Laitin, 2000). In the case of gender identities, this includes everyday essentialist beliefs that women are “biologically predisposed” to be more caring, nurturing, passive, and peaceful than men because women, with exceptions, have the physical capacity to become mothers (cf. Loken, 2017; Pankhurst, 2003; Sharlach, 1999). These beliefs about women’s “natural” peacefulness and passivity persist despite a substantial amount of empirical evidence that supports the constructivist point that there is no inevitable link between biological sex and gender, seeing, for instance, that women have been actively and voluntarily involved in physical fighting in a range of violent conflicts (Alison, 2004; Henshaw, 2016a, 2016b; Sharlach, 1999).

Even though it is not explicitly mentioned in either article, everyday essentialism plays a relevant role in the findings by Rosman and Rickover (2025) and Diacone et al. (2025): The “social and political considerations” discussed by Rosman and Rickover (2025, p. 1) refer to attitudes toward women beyond their actual combat effectiveness in the IDF and include inter alia concerns raised by “a conservative organization focusing on family values” (Rosman and Rickover, 2025, p. 11). The authors’ results thus indicate that, even in Israel’s context, where women as well as men are conscripted into military service, women are not fully endorsed as fighters, based—at least in part—on everyday essentialist stereotypes that associate women with motherhood, “tradition,” and, possibly, physical weakness (see also Harrell, 2023; Pankhurst, 2003).

Similarly, Diacone et al. (2025) showcase the difficulties that gender stereotypes based on everyday essentialist assumptions create for women in the armed forces. According to their findings, women in the NAF have to navigate stereotypical dichotomies regarding their identity as women on one hand, and regarding their identity as military personnel on the other: As women, they are expected to perform “traditional feminine roles” (Diacone et al., 2025, p. 16) that are associated with “passivity . . . and niceness” (Jack & Ali, 2010, p. 141, cited in Diacone et al., 2025, p. 16). As military personnel, they have to embrace masculine norms that emphasize traits such as “dominance, and physical strength” (Diacone et al., 2025, p. 2).

Taken together, the evidence presented in Rosman and Rickover (2025) and Diacone et al. (2025) contributes to a broader literature that demonstrates how—across different country, war, and military contexts—everyday essentialist gender stereotypes affect the culture of military organizations, the experiences of female military personnel, and public attitudes toward women in state armed forces: Although their numbers have grown over time (Campbell et al., 2023; Shields and Travis, 2024), women in armed forces still operate in an organizational environment that—as a generalized trend—remains male-dominated and masculine-coded (Campbell et al., 2023; King, 2014; Spijkers et al., 2024). As long as everyday essentialist assumptions about “weak women” and “strong men” persist, women will continue to face questions within the armed forces and society about their belonging to the military more broadly and about their suitability for certain (e.g., combat) roles more specifically (Crowley & Sandhoff, 2017; Diacone et al., 2025; Iskra, 2007; Rosman and Rickover, 2025; Spijkers et al., 2024).

This somber—as not easy to overcome—issue of everyday essentialism leads to another relevant point in the findings by Rosman and Rickover (2025) and Diacone et al. (2025): the implications of their results for arguments about “the transformative potential” of war.

The Transformative Potential of War Argument

In recent years, there has been a growing number of predominantly quantitative writings which state that war may have “transformative potential . . . for female empowerment” (Bakken & Buhaug, 2021, p. 982), by contributing to an increase in the number of women in parliament (Hughes & Tripp, 2015) and/or an expansion of women’s political rights after war has ended (Gurses et al., 2020; Savun et al., 2024). Arguably, war’s “transformative potential” lies in war’s disruption of pre-war gender hierarchies, for instance in the following ways (Bakken & Buhaug, 2021; Hughes & Tripp, 2015; Savun et al., 2024; Thomas, 2024; Webster et al., 2019):

• women may need to fill gaps left by men who fight, died, or have been imprisoned in combat;

• there may be shifts in social and political norms at the public and elite level, once women are seen to take on roles during war that they did not (or could not) take on before the war; and

• local or international actors (for instance, local women’s groups or third-party peace negotiators) may put pressure on political leaders to enhance women’s rights and political participation.

There are several critiques that could be raised against the transformative potential of war argument, including well-known ambiguities of what is meant with “empowerment” (Cornwall, 2016; Velija, 2021), or unclear assumptions about whether the “transformative potential” lies primarily on or off the battlefield, and in war or peacebuilding dynamics (cf. e.g., Savun et al., 2024; Webster et al., 2019). The arguably greatest concern with the transformative potential of war argument, however, is that it runs counter to qualitative findings on the short-lived or largely performative empowerment that women may experience: Qualitative evidence from case studies as diverse as Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka has shown that—even in civil wars where there was a relatively high number of women fighting in non-state armed groups—women may become de-securitized and are expected to return to more “traditional roles” after the war has ended, that is, roles that, based on everyday essentialist gender stereotypes, see women’s primary responsibilities in looking after the household and family (Alison, 2004; Gutiérrez & Murphy, 2023; MacKenzie, 2009). While these case studies tend to focus on women in non-state armed groups, the findings by Diacone et al. (2025) and Rosman and Rickover (2025) indicate that women serving in state armed forces are affected by comparable dynamics: The persistence of everyday essentialist stereotypes is such that, according to Diacone et al. (2025), even interviewees who had “been working their entire careers at the armed forces” (Diacone et al., 2025, p. 13) were reluctant to report sick because of menopausal health issues, arguably due to fears that this might reinforce ideas of women’s physical weakness or vulnerability. As noted earlier, Rosman and Rickover (2025) find that views on gender roles more broadly, rather than women’s actual battle performance, seem to drive attitudes toward female combat soldiers. They even frame their arguments by noting that: “Traditionally, it is only when the security situation is critical, that women are called upon to join combat formations as part of a national war effort . . . When conflict is over, women are expected to return to their traditional roles” (Rosman and Rickover, 2025, pp. 3–4). The two articles thus clearly illustrate that there have been limits to the empowerment of women in the NAF and IDF, irrespective of the length of their career or active battle participation, as they feel compelled to hide their female body and its functions (Diacone et al., 2025) and receive overall low support for an expansion of their (combat) roles in the military (Rosman and Rickover, 2025). Both articles highlight how everyday essentialist gender stereotypes have created obstacles for military women, as they reduce the freedom that these women feel to endorse female-specific life stages in a male-dominated and masculine-coded environment (Diacone et al., 2025), and as they prevent policy changes that could enhance women’s career opportunities within the armed forces (Rosman and Rickover, 2025). Overall, the two articles substantiate previous claims about the tensions between empowerment and disempowerment that women may feel in armed forces (Crowley & Sandhoff, 2017). They also cast a critical light on the transformative potential of war argument, as they demonstrate—like other qualitative writings before them (Alison, 2004; Gutiérrez & Murphy, 2023; MacKenzie, 2009)—that, irrespective of armed group, conflict, or country context, everyday essentialist stereotypes constitute a major obstacle for women’s liberties and opportunities, so that we need to remain critical of how much potential for “transformation” there really is.

Conclusion

Why does all of the above matter? Because everyday essentialism remains rife and affects both social and political dynamics (see also Jouet, 2019): As Diacone et al. (2025) and Rosman and Rickover (2025) so aptly demonstrate, everyday essentialist stereotypes have a clear impact on the culture of military organizations, the experiences of female military personnel, and public attitudes toward women in state armed forces. We thus do not engage with arguments by Diacone et al. (2025) and Rosman and Rickover (2025) in this commentary because we have concerns about the authors’ findings, methodology, theoretical approach, or interpretation. Rather, we seek to push their arguments one step further, by highlighting how they complement—and, indeed, challenge—writings on the transformative potential of war. Given that a growing number of these writings use quantitative analysis, there is a good chance that their “hard data” nature may lead academics and policymakers to overstate war’s “development-enhancing” effects (Duvendack and Theuerkauf, 2024). To counter this risk, we urge readers to pay closer attention to research by authors such as Diacone et al. (2025) and by Rosman and Rickover (2025), which clearly illustrates the limits—based on everyday essentialist stereotypes—of how much “empowerment” women in armed forces, during or after war, can achieve.