Sainik schools have admitted girl students. The National Defence Academy (NDA) has inducted women and use a gender-neutral term ‘officer cadets’ to address both men and women cadets. Servicewomen have been granted permanent commission and command roles in the Indian Army in all arms except infantry. The Army Military Police has recruited women soldiers for the first time. Indeed, this is a moment to rejoice because the woman citizenry’s hopes, aspirations and ideas are no more found missing from the Indian Army’s formal narrative and practices. The praise goes to the Supreme Court that ordered the Ministry of Defence to equitably integrate women into the Indian Armed Forces. The apex court emphasised in unequivocal terms:“The time has come for a realisation that women officers in the Army are not adjuncts to a male dominated establishment whose presence must be tolerated within narrow confines”. Begrudgingly, the defence ministry opened the gates of these military institutions to women. The question is whether we must celebrate the entry of women into these all-male bastions.We must not celebrate just the entry because patriarchy is remarkably adaptable. It does not get extinguished but mutates and manifests in different avatars. Further, we must not forget that military law assumes masculine domination and gender hierarchy and writes them into canons and offices as the norm. But then how can we make military law and practice more gender equal, inclusive and representative in light of the government’s goal of Nari Shakti in the Indian Army’s context? The masculine pattern of military policy, practices and seeing the world could be altered if the central realities of servicewomen’s day to day lives were included. By which we mean that a simple admission into all-male bastions is not enough. While women are being inducted as students, cadets and soldiers respectively into Sainik schools, defence academies and soldiering, they are still missing from leadership roles and decision-making ranks of ‘brigadier’, ‘major general’ and ‘lieutenant general’. Why is this so?We must ask four probing questions to analyse the issue of servicewomen’s equitable promotion policy:First, where are the women?Second, why are they there?Third, who is benefitting from their being there?Fourth, what do they think about being there?The case in point is of women who were inducted as Short Service Commission (SSC) officers into the service arms and combat support arms of the Indian Army beginning in 1992. They litigated for over two decades and ultimately were granted permanent commission and command positions by the Supreme Court in 2020. Particularly, servicewomen in the technical arms namely Corps of Engineers, Corps of Signals, Army Aviation Corps, Corps of Electronics and Mechanical Engineers have been promoted to the rank of ‘colonel’. However, there is a bleak chance that servicewomen will rise above the rank of ‘colonel’ in the Indian Army. Further, there is even a lower possibility that they will engage at the decision-making and policy formulation levels in the Indian Army. At this stage, it is important to understand that constitutional provisions on gender equality and non-discrimination coupled with judicial pronouncements on substantive equality are not enough. The defence ministry must engage in ‘empathetic cooperation’. The military leadership must seriously listen to the concerns, fears and agendas of those they are unaccustomed to heeding when formulating organisational and promotional policies. They must take on board rather than dismiss servicewomen’s vulnerabilities and circumstances with respect to the terms of engagement and promotion. They must find in servicewomen’s concerns strains of their own broader organisational concerns. Indian Army’s fundamental values of national security and military preparedness must go hand in hand with gender diversity. Men and women officers holding the rank of ‘colonel’ have nearly the same number of years of service in the Indian Army i.e. more than 16 years. More or less, they fall within the same age bracket. They have the same promotion board and are evaluated on the basis of the same objective parameters for the rank of ‘brigadier’ and above. Considering the existing restrictions on women’s entry into the combat arms of the Indian Army, the technical arms are in fact the only viable spaces where women officers can find considerable opportunities for promotion. However, there are structural and procedural barriers which bar servicewomen’s rise to the top ranks of the organisation.First, women officers have not undergone the technical engineering graduate and post-graduate courses like BTech and MTech like their male counterparts from the same batch. Only men who got permanent commission were mandated to complete their BTech degree and subsequently their MTech degree. Because until 2020, women were not granted permanent commission, they lost out on the technical degrees and mandatory up-skilling. Second, women officers were not required to do competitive courses like the Defence Services Staff College (DSSC) which their male counterparts completed when they were 35 years old. It is important to point out that the DSSC is a prestigious course that prepares an officer for promotion to the higher ranks in the Indian Army. Third, women officers are going to wholly lose out on the specific marks allotted by the promotion board for technical and professional degrees and DSSC course. It is because technical degrees and professional courses are objective factors and have a direct effect on an officer’s prospects of promotion to the ranks of ‘brigadier’, ‘major general’ and ‘lieutenant general’. Notably, some hard-working and ambitious women colonels are willing to undergo the DSSC course at the age of 50 or 51 years. But the expectations from a 35-year-old man and 50-year-old woman and their actual performance in DSSC course would be significantly different. Howsoever fit and enthusiastic a 50-year-old woman might be, a 35-year-old man would be no match to her based on their varying life circumstances and priorities. They are in very different stages of life even if they are the in same profession of serving the Indian nation. It is important to understand the bodily and mental make-up of a 50-year-old servicewoman in the Indian Army as well. She is likely to be undergoing menopause, experiencing hormonal imbalances, and also looking after the home and her children, who are probably taking board exams. Arguably, women colonels need not complete those technical degrees and the DSSC course. Nevertheless, the board will consider them for promotion to the brigadier rank and above. This sounds fair only in theory, because in practice, women colonels will not get the marks allotted to their male counterparts for the degrees and courses. For example, in the past, women’s Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) were not taken seriously by their Commanding Officers (COs) because they were not considered for permanent commission like men officers. Prior to 2020, women in the technical arms were appointed only for the short-run and as such their ACRs did not matter. Likewise, because they were not eligible for promotion, they were not required to undertake rigorous courses and technical degrees like the men. Prestigious technical courses were exclusively reserved for the men. Men officers got separate marks for these courses which formed a part of the objective and quantifiable criteria for the purpose of promotion. Post-2020 and with the grant of permanent commission and command positions to women officers, their ACRs matter as much as their male counterparts. For promotions, completion of technical degrees and courses matters as much for women as they do for men officers. But the reality is that in the promotion scorecard the compulsory fields which are assigned to professional degrees and courses continue to remain filled for men but empty for women. This has far-reaching implications for the women officers in the technical arms who aspire for higher ranks. When women and men officers are competing for a fixed number of spots for the brigadier rank, there is a high likelihood that women will be marked lower and hence would fail to make it to the higher rank. The Indian Army’s promotion system is a pyramidal structure in which only a few extremely competent officers are able to reach the top of the organisation. Even high performers are left from being considered for the higher ranks over a single decimal point. In such a scenario, it is highly likely that without the requisite technical degrees and courses, servicewomen will be automatically left out.As such, the defence ministry must pay close attention to the stark dissimilarities that exist between women and men colonels that make them different from each other. After all, only likes must be treated alike under the Indian Constitution. Empathetic cooperation is a method that helps to navigate such institutional dilemmas and the politics of gendered promotions in the Indian Army. We must not forget that changing formal institutional norms of entry and admission is only the beginning of the gendered transformation and by itself is no guarantee that promotional practices and leadership culture has become significantly less patriarchal. As such, there must be a separate promotion board to evaluate men and women officers to create a balance and make up for the loss of marks by women colonels due to the defence ministry’s earlier policies.Prerna Dhoop is a PhD candidate at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London (KCL). She is a socio-legal research scholar of gender, military integration and constitutional rights. Vandana Dhoop is a PhD candidate at The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Mumbai. Her research focuses on gender, environmental governance & democratic institutions.