Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sparked controversy in November when he said that he did not believe women should be allowed to serve in combat roles in the military. In a podcast interview Hegesth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles”; he added that he believes “it hasn’t made us more effective” and “has made fighting more complicated.” Hegseth has since said that he supports women in the military, although in his confirmation hearing he expressed concern that military standards have been lowered to accommodate women in combat.
Hegseth’s comments have led to discussion about the impact that women have had in the U.S. military since they were first allowed to serve in combat roles in 2013. To understand how Americans’ views have evolved on this issue, we repeated questions from a 2016 YouGov survey. This allows us to see if the past decade has brought changes in Americans’ attitudes towards women in the military and beliefs about women’s impact on military effectiveness.
Support for women serving in combat roles has grown since 2016. In 2025, 67% of Americans strongly or somewhat support allowing women to serve in combat roles, compared to 65% who said the same in 2016. While this increase is modest and inside the margin of error, there has been a larger decline in the share of Americans who oppose women serving in combat roles: 23% of Americans strongly or somewhat oppose women serving in combat roles, compared to 29% who were opposed in 2016.
American women are more likely to support women serving in combat roles than men, and Democrats are more supportive than Republicans, with Independents positioned in between. However, members of all of these groups are more likely to support than to oppose women serving in combat roles. These patterns also were in place in 2016.
There has been a more striking change in Americans’ beliefs about how allowing women to serve in combat roles affects the military’s effectiveness. Americans are now more likely to say that allowing women to serve in combat roles increases the military’s effectiveness than to say that it decreases the military’s effectiveness: 30% say it increases effectiveness while 17% say it decreases it. In contrast, Americans were evenly split in 2016: 22% of Americans said it would increase effectiveness while 22% said it would decrease effectiveness.
Today, both men and women are more likely to say that women in combat roles increase the military’s effectiveness, while in 2016 men were more likely to say it would decrease the military’s effectiveness. In fact, men are more likely in 2025 to say that women increase the military’s effectiveness than women were to say so in 2016. Independents’ attitudes also have flipped. In 2025, Independents are more likely to say that women in combat roles increase the military’s effectiveness, while in 2016 they were slightly more likely to say women in combat roles would decrease effectiveness. Now and in 2016, Democrats have been more likely to say women in combat increase military effectiveness while Republicans have been more likely to say they decrease effectiveness. Nevertheless, between 2016 and 2025, Americans in all parties have become more likely to say women in combat increase effectiveness and less likely to say they decrease effectiveness.
American support for allowing women to serve in non-combat roles in the military is even broader than the majority support for women serving in combat roles: 81% strongly or somewhat support women serving in non-combat roles, while only 8% strongly or somewhat oppose. However, support has slightly declined since 2016, when 89% of Americans supported women in non-combat roles and 7% opposed. Most of the decline in support can be attributed to an increase in the share of Americans saying they are not sure whether they support or oppose women serving in non-combat roles: that share has grown from 5% in 2016 to 11% in 2025. The shares of both men and women who support women in non-combat roles has declined, as have the shares of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who support women in non-combat military roles. Nonetheless, Americans who oppose women serving in non-combat roles make up small shares of each of these groups in 2025, just as they did in 2016.
Attitudes towards women in combat roles and women in non-combat roles have followed countervailing trends. While support for women in combat has increased considerably, support for women in non-combat roles has somewhat decreased. This suggests that Americans’ attitudes about women’s roles in the military are converging — the delineation between combat and non-combat roles is less of a factor in 2025 than it was in 2016. In 2016, 55% of Americans gave the same answer when asked about their feelings towards women in combat and non-combat roles. In 2025, that share increased to 64%. This primarily means there are fewer Americans in 2025 who support women in non-combat roles but oppose or are unsure about women in combat roles. Most of that change has come from the growing share of Americans who support women in combat, but some of the change also has come from an increase in the share of Americans who oppose women in both types of military roles.
— Taylor Orth and Carl Bialik contributed to this article
See the results of this poll:
- Do you support or oppose women being allowed to serve in non‑combat roles in the military?
- Do you support or oppose women being allowed to serve in combat roles in the military?
- Do you think that allowing women to serve in combat roles increases or decreases the effectiveness of the American military?
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Methodology: The Daily Questions survey was conducted online on January 24, 2025, among 5,044 U.S. adults. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, U.S. census region, and political party. The margin of error for the survey is approximately 1.5%.
Image: Getty (Spencer Platt / Staff)
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