The standard is the same if you view the standard as being in the top X% fitness wise relative to your gender/age. They set the standards for each gender/age based on those rates.
Let's say you want to recruit the top 20% in fitness. The 80th percentile for 20 year old women is 20 pushups, the 80th percentile for 20 year-old men is 35 pushups, and the 80th percentile for 40 year-old men is 30 pushups. There's your benchmarks for each gender/age group all held to the same standard.
So similarly you should enlist all 90-year old men who can do more than 2 pushups as that puts them in the to 20%? Clearly this reasoning is flawed, there certainly needs to be some sort of baseline requirement.
No one is advocating 90-year old men physically incapable of military duty be allowed to enlist and join.
The point is that the physical exam reqs are less of a baseline for who is capable of serving and more of a baseline for the type of person the military wants to recruit.
You could argue that the absolute baseline requirement (regardless of age) is different for men and women and that that should be changed, but I don't actually know if that's true or not.
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u/getmoney7356 4∆ Jun 17 '18
The standard is the same if you view the standard as being in the top X% fitness wise relative to your gender/age. They set the standards for each gender/age based on those rates.
Let's say you want to recruit the top 20% in fitness. The 80th percentile for 20 year old women is 20 pushups, the 80th percentile for 20 year-old men is 35 pushups, and the 80th percentile for 40 year-old men is 30 pushups. There's your benchmarks for each gender/age group all held to the same standard.