Norway’s Radical Military Experiment

Two years ago, 19-year-old Mari Gillebo reported for duty as a professional soldier in central Norway. Far from being a minority in her air defense battalion, she had joined a unit that was 50 percent female. And the female soldiers were treated exactly like their male colleagues, even sharing sleeping quarters with them.

Gillebo didn’t mind the mixed-gender bedrooms. Like most Norwegian children, she had grown up doing virtually everything in a coed setting: playing on mixed-gender sports teams and learning woodworking and home economics in secondary school together with both boys and girls. “But I was very skeptical about