After completing her service in the military, Ginger Gunnip wanted to put it behind her.

“When I first got out, I didn’t want to carry it with me,” Gunnip said, “I didn’t want to be a part of it or talk about.”

Gunnip joined the U.S. Army when she was 23 years old. She served at Fort Drum in northern New York for nearly three years, and served 15 months in Iraq. During her service, she assisted in female search missions, drove trucks and worked guard duty.

Gunnip’s experience of not self-identifying as a veteran is not that uncommon amongst female veterans, according to Michael Haynie, executive director and founder of Institute for Veteran and Military Families and vice chancellor for veterans and military affairs at Syracuse University.

Female veterans are, as compared to male veterans, almost seven times less likely to self-identify as veterans, he said.

“To be honest, I wanted to put it in the past,” Gunnip said.

This is especially concerning to Haynie, who said that, within the next five to seven years, women will make up 20 percent of the military, and current systems and processes to support this group aren’t good enough.

“Women are probably the most underserved and least understood segment of the veteran population,” Haynie said.

The IVMF and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs are teaming up to elevate the discourse that can begin to fix this problem. They will hold an International Women’s Day celebration on Thursday and Friday, which this year honors women who serve in combat and post-combat zones.

The event will feature Dr. Mindy Grewal, Women’s Health Medical Director at the Syracuse VA Medical Center, an alumni panel, and keynote speech by Maj. Gen. Linda Singh who is the Adjutant General for the Maryland Military Department.

“We want to celebrate the contributions that these women make, and make the campus aware that many of these women are us, they’re SU people,” said Mary Lovely, an economics professor and co-organizer of the event.

Lovely said service members deal with a lot of complex emotions when they return home, in addition to traumas they may have experienced. “The loss of the mission is a big deal,” Lovely said. “Being part of a team that’s trying to rebuild the country can be a pretty heady thing.”

Gunnip said she found this to be true after leaving the military.

Immediately after her service, she began pursing her bachelor’s of science in bioengineering with a minor in writing and rhetoric at SU. She took care of her then 8-month-old son, while commuting from near Watertown, New York.

“There’s a camaraderie that you think was lost after you get out of the military. It’s one of the most devastating things that a solider loses,” Gunnip said.

Gunnip, now pursuing her master’s in engineering management, said that, as an engineering student, she jumped back into another challenging, predominately male world.

“I face the same the struggles as I did in the military,” Gunnip said. “I want to be respected for the quality work I can do and skills I have, and there’s the pressure to fit in with the guys.”

Haynie said he realized the prevalence of these struggles amongst female veterans when the IVMF teamed up with Karen Mills, then administrator of the Small Business Administration, to create Women Veterans Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship, which brings together 200 women for a three-day conference style business-training event in various cities.

“Initially I was not super supportive,” Haynie said. “As an entrepreneurship professor there’s no evidence to suggest that I would train a woman to be a business owner any different than I would train a man.”

But Mills was persistent, and the program held it’s first conference at a hotel in San Antonio, Texas in 2011, where Haynie said he had his first real, transformative experience.

When he arrived groups of women were checking in for the conference and many were standing in groups together, crying.

“I was panicking at first because I thought maybe we messed up the registration,” Haynie said. “I started talking to these women and realized their emotion was about being around other female veterans.”

Many of them had never participated in a veterans event before. The reason they came, Haynie said, was because it was only for women. They said they felt welcome, and emotionally and physically safe.

At a typical veteran event, Haynie said there would be an average of 10 women out of 100 participants.

“Now I’m this program’s biggest cheerleader,” Haynie said. “I didn’t see the power of creating an environment where this group of women who have that shared experience of military experience can feed off each other and have that peer support.”

Haynie said that the event made him realize the need for services tailored to female veterans as a population.

“It’s crucial to uniquely empower female veterans and not generically prescribe one answer to the entire population ” he said.

A struggle they often face in this, Haynie said, is figuring out how to proactively reach out to female veterans, who, like Gunnip, may not want to identify as such initially.

Gunnip was eventually able to find her place at SU with the assistance of the IVMF services.

“It’s a great feeling to know that you’re connected to this huge network,” she said. “You realize you have family of veteran military service members, bigger than you had as an active duty solider.”

Gunnip is also involved with the Student Veteran Organization on campus and is in a veteran’s writing group where members give each other feedback to hopefully get published.

Gunnip said that, after being out of the military for a few years, she was finally motivated to identify as a veteran on her resume.

“Professors and friends close to me encouraged me to start to actually think of it as skill set that could be marketable for a career,” she said. “It took a while but I figured out how to make it work.”

Published on February 26, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Lydia: lawilson@syr.edu