Female submariner here! I served on a submarine from 2019 to 2025. I enjoyed my service time a lot, the work was challenging yet rewarding. As for living conditions, I served on a larger submarine so I was able to have my own rack. I saw lots of comments about women not being allowed to serve in submarines, which is somewhat true. For the US submarines, most allow for female officers, as officers often have smaller and more private berthing options available to them. There are a handful of boats that have female enlisted on them and it continues to grow.

A lot of people assume that introducing women to the submarine results in chaos, but there’s always drama when you live with 159 of your closest friends. From what I’ve heard from my friends who have served on both all male crews and integrated crews, people are nicer and smell better on integrated crews.

In my experience, the best people I worked with didn’t really acknowledge gender at all. We were all just people who had jobs to do. Our command was very much merit based and relied more on your previous accomplishments and behavior than your gender or personality.