On 13 April 2026, Lieutenant General Susan Coyle was announced as the forty-second Chief of Army, the first woman to lead a branch of the Australian Defence Force in its 125-year history. By the time most Australians had finished their morning coffee, the online threads were already flooding with vitriol. She should be making sandwiches. Token DEI hire. Did the best man for the job get it? April Fool’s. At least the smoko hut will be clean. Hope no wars break out at that time of the month. Temu medals. I’d rather Ben Roberts-Smith.
These were not fringe comments. They were among the most visible, most repeated, and most widely circulated responses to the announcement of the ADF’s most credentialed officer appointment in years.
Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy called the commentary ‘despicable and disgraceful.’ The social media pages of women veterans’ groups were inundated with what one veteran advocate described as ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of posts containing ‘sexist, derogatory rubbish’.
The professional military as a modern institution was not designed to be gender neutral. It was constructed, during the Enlightenment consolidation of centralised state power, around what sociologists describe as martial masculinity: a gendered ideal in which the qualities of the soldier and the qualities of dominant manhood were deliberately fused. Physical prowess, emotional restraint, fraternal loyalty, and the authorised use of violence were the defining characteristics of both military service and masculine identity. The professional soldier was not simply a new occupational category but a gendered ideal through which military institutions reproduced and naturalised masculine authority. Women were not excluded from military service incidentally. They were excluded by institutional design.
Australia’s military history has been a long negotiation with that design. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of women served in the WAAAF, AWAS, and WRANS, performing work explicitly described at the time as ‘jobs traditionally done by men,’ only to have their services disbanded when the war ended. Cold War personnel pressures saw separate and subordinate women’s corps re-established in the 1950s; post-Vietnam recruitment shortfalls saw those corps dissolved and women integrated into the mainstream ADF in the 1980s. Combat role restrictions were progressively lifted from 1990 and finally abolished in 2016.
At every point, the expansion of women’s participation was driven by institutional need, not by institutional reckoning with the assumptions it had inherited. Women were, in sociologist Ben Wadham’s precise formulation, granted ‘guest’ status: welcome when their labour was required, expendable when it was not.
Women in the ADF have been constantly reminded of their ‘guest’ status through violent acts of exclusion. Since 1970 the ADF has been subject to more than 35 significant reviews into misconduct, abuse, and institutional culture. The 2024 Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide found women veterans were dying by suicide at up to five times the general population rate. Each inquiry documented the problem. None resolved it. The institutional conditions that produced the abuse were left largely intact.
Into this history walked Susan Coyle, carrying a service record that, by any rational assessment, stood beyond question. She had risen through thirty-nine years of service, commanding at every rank across the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Her career spanned operational service in Timor‑Leste, the Solomon Islands, and Afghanistan, including command of the ADF’s national headquarters for Middle East operations. By any conventional measure of military credibility, the appointment was indisputable. Yet it was fiercely contested in the ensuing public backlash.
A discourse analysis of more than 5,000 publicly available Facebook top-level comments across twelve Australian news outlet pages found that approximately 74% of comments were hostile to the appointment or to women in military leadership. The hostile commentary was largely extremely misogynistic in character, spanning several distinct but recognisable themes: the reduction of a decades long career to domestic function (sandwich-making, ironing, cleaning); the dismissal of the appointment as a diversity hire disconnected from merit; biological essentialism framing menstruation and hormones as disqualifications from command; and the explicit preference for Ben Roberts-Smith, a man facing war crime charges at the time, as a more legitimate alternative. This last point is analytically precise: a decorated male body of enlisted rank with a judicially contested war crimes record was considered a more credible candidate than a decorated female body with an operationally distinguished one.
That cultural logic does not originate inside the ADF’s gates. Research on the online manosphere, the loosely networked ecosystem of antifeminist communities operating across social media and gaming platforms, has documented how this formation has migrated from fringe communities into mainstream public discourse. Military inculturation provides a context for manosphere ideologies to intensify. The martial tradition gives it structure and authority, the military fraternity gives it identity and belonging, and the fiction of the exceptional masculine warrior gives it meaning. The ADF does not manufacture misogyny from nothing. It takes a formation already present in civil society and deepens it. The comment sections on 13 April showed what that formation looks like when it operates without institutional mediation.
Susan Coyle’s appointment is a milestone worth marking. The response to it is a policy problem worth naming. More than a century of institutional design, thirty-five years of inquiry, and the progressive removal of every formal barrier to women’s full participation have produced an institution that can appoint a woman as Chief of Army. They have not produced a culture that accepts her authority as self-evident. That gap, between formal inclusion and cultural legitimacy, is not a problem that another review will resolve. It requires an honest account of where the logic of exclusion actually comes from, how deeply it runs in both the institution and the society that produces it, and what it would genuinely take to dismantle it. Addressing that gap demands accountability from senior military leadership for the culture they preside over, and radical intervention in the education systems that shape young men long before they reach the recruitment office.
References:
- Adams, M. (2023). A Victory Job. Australian War Memorial. https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/103/a-victory-job
- Bates, L. (2021). Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists; the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All. Simon & Schuster UK.
- Commonwealth of Australia. (2024a). Final Report Volume 1: Executive summary, recommendations and the fundamentals. Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
- Commonwealth of Australia. (2024b). Final Report Volume 3: Military sexual violence, unacceptable behaviour and military justice. Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
- Greene, A. (2026, April 14). Sexist commentary towards Australia’s first female Army Chief Susan Coyle dubbed ‘despicable and disgraceful’. The Nightly. https://thenightly.com.au/australia/sexist-commentary-towards-australias-first-female-army-chief-susan-boyle-dubbed-despicable-and-disgraceful-c-22138544
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- Varker, T., Lawrence-Wood, E., Watson, L., Creamer, M., Sadler, N., Howlett, P., & O’Donnell, M. (2023). ADF members and ex-members suicide literature review: An update. Report prepared for the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. Phoenix Australia; Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health.
- Wadham, B., & Connor, J. (2023). Commanding men, governing masculinities: Military institutional abuse and organizational reform in the Australian armed forces. Gender, Work & Organization, 30, 1–19.
- Wadham, B., & Connor, J. (2024). Warrior Soldier Brigand: Institutional Abuse within the Australian Defence Force. Melbourne University Press.
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