Last year marked the first time in several years that the Army achieved its ambitious recruiting goals — primarily due to an increase in female recruits, according to internal service data reviewed by Military.com.
Nearly 10,000 women signed up for active duty in 2024, an 18% jump from the previous year, while male recruitment increased by just 8%, the data shows. The hike comes as the service continues to struggle with recruiting men, who have traditionally filled the bulk of its ranks but have become more of a challenge to enlist in recent years.
The numbers mark the continuation of a trend reported in a Military.com investigation that found a yearslong Army recruiting slump was centered around men, while female recruiting numbers have remained relatively strong. They also point to young women as an increasingly vital recruiting pool, especially as young men are struggling to meet the Army’s eligibility requirements.
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Female applicants may have an advantage over their male counterparts for a variety of reasons.
They are less likely to have criminal records, accounting for just 30% of juvenile arrests, according to data from the Justice Department. They’re also outpacing men in higher education, with nearly half of women aged 25 to 34 holding bachelor’s degrees compared to 37% of men, according to Pew Research data from late 2024.
Since 2013, male enlistments have dropped about 22%, from 58,000 men recruited that year to 45,000 last year.
The increase in female recruits comes despite the Army not changing much about its recruiting strategy. The service’s public-facing social media and ad campaigns still predominantly feature men — by as much as two to three times more, especially when it comes to speaking roles, according to a review of marketing materials from the past four years.
“It’s not about pandering to women; it’s about creating a professional environment accessing the best talent, where we’ve been undervaluing pursuing women,” Katherine Kuzminski, an expert on the military and veterans at the Center for a New American Security, told Military.com in an interview.
Applicants with a college background are increasingly important: Nearly 5,000 new recruits who enlisted in the service last year had higher education, a 14% increase from 2023. College-level degrees are becoming more expected among enlisted troops, particularly as they advance through leadership ranks.
On the ground, Army recruiters broadly do not consider demographics when it comes to outreach, and efforts are generally not employed strategically, something the service is aiming to remedy in the coming years. That move is not to satisfy any vague diversity goals, officials have explained, but to become more surgical with courting potential applicants who are more likely to be eligible for service.
Meanwhile, the Army’s biggest recruiting challenge isn’t just convincing men to sign up — it’s finding eligible ones. Academic standards have become a major barrier for recruits, with a significant portion failing to meet the minimum requirements for enlistment.
The Army requires a high school diploma, and many roles demand strong scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, a standardized test that assesses math, science and language skills and with which applicants often struggle. That trend coincides with falling test scores that schools have been seeing for decades but which were worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2022, the Army started the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, a pre-basic training camp that takes otherwise ineligible applicants and gets them up to snuff for service — either to meet academic or body fat standards. The lion’s share are recruits who came up short on the entrance test, and roughly 70% are men, according to internal Army data.
Studies have shown a troubling trend in U.S. education: Boys are falling behind girls in nearly every academic category, including reading and writing. That achievement gap starts in elementary school and often widens over time. By high school, boys are less likely to graduate on time compared to their female peers, and the differences are even more pronounced among male minorities.
As more women enlist into the Army and the percentage of eligible male candidates shrinks, women are increasingly rising through the ranks and taking on senior leadership roles.
Related: The Army’s Recruiting Problem Is Male