Gender, personality, and coping: Unraveling gender in military post-deployment physical and mental wellness

While federal mandate precludes women from serving in such combat-intense occupations as infantry and armor, military women are exposed to stressful and often traumatic events that were once considered the exclusive domain of men (Holmstedt, 2007). The assumption by the Army's Mental Health Assessment Team (MHAT) that distinctions between men and women can be made based exclusively upon biological sex and the assertions that no differences exist between men and women deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom is examined in the present study through the lenses of sex, gender, personality, locus of control, and ways of coping. In hierarchical multiple regression the researcher find distinctive predictive ability and relationships between sex, gender, personality, and ways of coping with locus of control, PTSD symptom severity, trauma-related guilt. While biological sex is a fundamental determinant of number and types of trauma, the holarchical biological, psychological, and sociological dimensions of gender establish event meaning, elicit response to the event, and contribute substantially to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and severity, and trauma-related guilt. Stereotypical generalizations based exclusively on physical distinction are hubris with potentially far-reaching lifelong consequences.