Remember the study that concluded that female Marines were slower, less accurate with weapons and more injury-prone than men? The one that concluded that all-male units were faster and more lethal than mixed-gender units on most combat tasks? The one that came as a surprise to exactly no one who’s actually looked at a man’s upper body and a woman’s and thought, “Vive la différence?“

Well, not to worry. Turns out that morale in these mixed-gender units is perfectly satisfactory. Just as good as in the all-male groups, reports The New York Times with evident delight:

… a Marine Corps study made public by a women’s advocacy group this week found that after months of testing mixed-gender combat units, troops reported morale equal to that of all-male groups and higher than noncombat integrated groups.

So morale is just as good, albeit no better, but they still can’t shoot as straight, throw a pack over as high a wall, or evacuate a casualty as quickly. Oh well. The important thing is that they feel just as good while shooting the wrong targets, letting the guys pick up their packs for them, failing to drag their buddies to safety, then nursing their overuse injuries, right? It’s not as if those skills are of direct, practical, daily relevance to a Marine or anything:

“There has been this band of brothers idea that there is something special about having only men, and adding women will ruin it,” said Ellen Haring, a senior fellow at the advocacy group and a reserve Army colonel. “The study doesn’t bear that out.”

The other nice thing to know is that the study found sexual assault levels no higher than in the Marines as a whole. (But why would anyone expect them to be? Is the assumption here that only lack of proximity to women separates rape-prone Marines from normal ones?) Apart from that, we’ve still got a few problems with these mixed-gender units. To wit:

• All-male squads and teams outperformed those that included women on 69 percent of the 134 ground combat tasks evaluated.
• All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams. Those teams had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
• Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle and the M203 grenade launcher.
• Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system, at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.

You know what I think is special about having “a bunch of men” do these things? They do it better. If you tell me my neurosurgeon has Parkinson’s disease but not to worry, 41 percent of the time his hands don’t shake at all and besides, his morale is terrific, I’m still not going to want him anywhere near my brain. That’s not prejudice against the disabled, it’s just common sense.

One would think.