Marching into the Leadership Pipeline: Gender,College Type,and ROTC Participation

The U.S. military commissions officers through service academies (e.g., West Point), officer candidate schools (intensive military leadership training for service members), and Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) units on college campuses. Of these pathways, ROTC is the largest, graduating approximately 8,000 students each year into an officer corps that leads 2.5 million service members (U.S. Department of Defense 2023). ROTC graduates also go on to occupy important leadership positions in their postmilitary careers (Miller and Benton 1992).

Increasing the representation of women in traditionally male fields, particularly in leadership positions, is a consequential and long-standing challenge (cf. Gorman and Kmec 2009; Huffman, Cohen, and Pearlman 2010; Melin 2016). The ROTC program began accepting women in 1970 (O’Connor 2020), and the share of ROTC graduates who are women grew from 20.7 percent in 2011 to 25.7 percent in 2021 (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2023). Yet despite the potential of ROTC programs to help diversify the leadership of the U.S. military, and subsequently the often male-dominated sectors in which many veterans work, little is known about why the gender composition of ROTC units varies among the 323 host campuses.

We use data published as part of a U.S. Government Accountability Office (2023) report to visualize the heterogeneity in the percentage of women among officers produced by the 323 four-year schools that host ROTC units. Figure 1 plots the share of women in the student body on the x-axis and the share of women among officers commissioned from those schools’ ROTC programs on the y-axis, with the size of each circle denoting the number of women commissioned on each campus. Blue markers represent Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), green markers represent senior military colleges (as defined by the Association of Military Colleges and Schools of the United States), and hollow markers represent all other schools. Most schools are concentrated at the bottom right of the graph because they have a majority female student body and their female students are less likely to earn ROTC commissions than their male students. Campuses at the top right, many of them HBCUs, stand out from the much larger group of schools at the lower right because their ROTC graduating classes are more gender balanced. Although women and men also earn commissions at similar rates at a handful of heavily male, specialized military, maritime, or aeronautical schools at the lower left, these institutions still commission heavily male officer cohorts because these institutions enroll relatively few women.

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Figure 1.

The gender composition of the ROTC officers commissioned and the overall student body at HBCUs, senior military colleges, and other colleges.

This visualization shows that women make up an unusually large proportion of officers graduating from ROTC programs at HBCUs. Nine of the 10 ROTC programs with the highest percentage of female officers commissioned are at HBCUs. Understanding why ROTC programs at HBCUs are among the most gender integrated may have important lessons for efforts to diversify other ROTC programs as well as leadership pipelines in other traditionally male fields.