women are missing from only about 12 percent of all Army occupations with 10 or more personnel, a percentage considerably lower than is found in the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Navy, or the U.S. Department of Defense as a whole—even though women are prohibited from serving in ground combat operations, in which 30 percent of Army enlisted personnel can be found. (It is worth noting that only 35 percent of all military enlisted occupations were open to women when the nation initiated the all-volunteer force.)

Table 6.5 shows racial/ethnic distributions across enlisted occupational areas. As seen here, whites, Hispanics, and "others" tend to be concentrated in the infantry; blacks tend to be most highly concentrated in functional support and administration. The level of these concentrations can be better observed in Table 6.6, which shows the proportion of all enlistees in each occupa-