Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blocking of promotions for high-ranking women in the military has contributed to the lowest percentage of such nominations for women in at least 25 years, according to a New York Times analysis.
Eight of 201 candidates for high-ranking posts this year have been women, or 4 percent — less than half the average percentage of the past 10 years.
More women could still be promoted this year. And the number of women nominated for promotion in any year is relatively small, so the percentages can fluctuate based on a few individual officers. In 2012, for example, the percentage of high-ranking nominations going to women also fell below 5 percent.
But the proportion of female nominees would be higher in 2026 if not for Mr. Hegseth’s actions. He has blocked at least 40 high-ranking promotions from reaching the Senate in recent months — some for white men, but about half for women and people of color, The Times has reported.
It’s a substantial drop from 2025, when women reached the highest percentage of nominees on record during Mr. Hegseth’s first year as defense secretary.
Mr. Hegseth has not disclosed his reasons for blocking promotions, but he has argued that the Pentagon’s past diversity efforts have degraded the military. “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons,” he said in a speech to military leaders last September. “Based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.”
These high-level promotions, however, are extremely competitive. For one- and two-star ranks, selection boards across branches conduct an in-depth review to vet a candidate’s experience and record, in addition to the needs of the military at the time.
Some of the would-be nominees blocked by Mr. Hegseth had spoken publicly about the importance of diversity.
The decline in women’s nominations to high-ranking jobs, including general and admiral, stands in contrast to nominations for lower-level posts, including captain and major, which number in the thousands each year. Roughly 23 percent of those have gone to women, higher than in any other year in the Times analysis. This reflects the increasingly central role that women have come to play across the force over the last decade.
The Pentagon did not answer specific questions about the data, which The Times collected by analyzing 25 years of promotion nominations that require Senate approval and are listed in the Congressional Record. But Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that The Times’s reporting on gender “misses the point entirely.”
“The Department of War promotes officers solely on the basis of merit, performance and leadership potential,” he said. “There are many highly qualified women serving with distinction across our ranks, and every officer selected for promotion, regardless of gender, has earned that advancement through demonstrated excellence.”
Mr. Hegseth was defense secretary in 2025 when women reached a record high percentage of high-ranking nominees, 13 percent. But that year they made up a larger portion of a smaller pool: There were fewer overall nominations for promotion to high-ranking positions than at any point over the last quarter-century. At least one nomination list was held over from 2025 when Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll refused Mr. Hegseth’s order to strike two Black and two female officers.
Overall, the eight women nominated for high-ranking posts in the first seven months of this year are less than one-third the number nominated in recent years, according to the Times analysis.
High-ranking officers, referred to as general and flag officers, hold “a position of incredible importance,” said Mark Nevitt, a professor of law at Emory University and a former military lawyer.
These military leaders, one-star rank and above, typically oversee large units and have decades of experience.
Once approved by the selection boards, nominees are passed to department officials, including the defense secretary. The secretary may delay or withhold names from the nomination list for not meeting exemplary conduct service standards or if candidates are “mentally, physically, morally or professionally unqualified,” but the legality of Mr. Hegseth’s removals is unclear, Professor Nevitt said.
Nominations for three- and four-star generals, some of the military’s most exclusive positions, are usually chosen by military leadership before being sent to the defense secretary, who then selects a candidate to send to the president.
The largest drop-offs in women’s promotions came from the Navy and the Air Force. If the trend continues, this will be the first year since at least 2001 when no female active-duty naval officers are promoted to admiral. Mr. Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of several women and people of color to the rank of two-star admiral.
There are other reasons that the number of female nominees for high-ranking positions is relatively low in any given year, said Kelly Atkinson, a senior political scientist at RAND, a nonpartisan research institute.
Female candidates tend to leave the military earlier than their male counterparts, research shows, and women weren’t allowed to serve in some combat roles until 1993.
The lower-ranking nominations for promotion, nearly a quarter of which have gone to women this year, more closely reflect the overall composition of the military by gender. Women made up about 18 percent of active-duty members in 2024, according to the Department of Defense. The process for lower-ranking nominations is more structured and predictable, Dr. Atkinson said.
Mr. Hegseth has also sought to reduce the total number of general and flag officers, ordering a 20 percent cut in four-star officers and a 10 percent cut in high-level officers overall. He has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals.
The women who appear on nomination lists sent to Mr. Hegseth “are those who have accomplished a 20-year military career already,” Dr. Atkinson said. “Removing them at a certain point of their career can negate the contributions they’ve made, even while facing barriers.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting. Additional work by Francesca Paris.
About the data
The Times collected nomination data from the Congress.gov API from the past 25 years. High-ranking officers are any nominee at the O-7 rank or above.
The analysis included all presidential nominations submitted to the Senate. Nominations included officers regardless of their eventual promotion outcome, as many 2026 nominations have not yet been given final Senate approval. These nominees include officers who were nominated for the same rank across multiple years because of position changes, or those who had nominations delayed by a year. The analysis excluded National Guard and reserves nominees based on the introductory text in the nomination documents. Space Force was included in Air Force statistics.
To determine a nominee’s gender, The Times used a method that estimates probability of gender based on United States birth data using the gender package in R, filtering for names associated with those who were 30 to 90 years old at the time of nomination. Reporters manually verified more than 1,500 nominations with the rank of O-7 or above where the probability of a nominee’s gender was less than 99 percent, did not return a result or occurred in 2026 and 2012. The analysis excluded names that did not return a result for lower-level ranks. For names not manually verified, the analysis weighted candidates depending on the probability that a name belonged to a certain gender.
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