Men Over Merit: Gendering Images of Power and Competence in the Military

Journal article

As potent symbols of power and the state, military organisations and their personnel composition have important implications for the construction of gender images in broader society. The question of who can (or should) participate in the military has further developed into a cultural and political flashpoint amidst simultaneous trends of demographic decline and militarisation in democracies throughout the world. These trends have been particularly pronounced in Japan, where the government has claimed to address the resulting recruitment shortages by hiring more female personnel. This article examines why the share of women in the country’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) remains curiously low, nevertheless. Based on previously undisclosed admissions data from the military academy whose graduates dominate the SDF’s senior leadership, this article shows how gender-specific recruitment targets have amounted to a system of affirmative action for male applicants, where the path to admission for women has proven up to six times more competitive. Contrary to entrenched notions of a link between masculinity and military prowess, this article demonstrates how artificially maintaining a male-dominated composition of the SDF leadership has come at the detriment to the organisation’s own meritocratic principles, undermining the academic and physical standards the recruitment process purports to uphold. This article thus introduces a novel claim to the literature on the theoretical determinants of gender composition in military organisations: The more meritocratic the recruitment process, the more balanced the share of male and female personnel.

Authors: Moeller, BA

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal: Gender Issues
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 20
• Publication date: 2026-03-03
• Acceptance date: 2026-02-15
• DOI: 10.1007/s12147-026-09407-w
• EISSN: 1936-4717
• ISSN: 1098092X, 1098-092X
• Language: English
• Keywords: recruitment; Japan; Women; military; Self-defense forces; gender