She parked in the veteran's spot at the grocery store. A stranger walked up and asked, "I hope you served." She had. Twenty years. But she still questioned whether she had the right to be there.
This is not an isolated story. It is a pattern so consistent that researchers have documented it across multiple studies. And the findings are striking.
Dr. Robbin Higgins conducted a qualitative study with seven women veterans — all of them benefits-eligible, all of them with honorable service records. She asked them about their veteran identity. Every single one of them expressed pride in their military service. And not one of them self-identified as a veteran.
Let that sit for a moment.
Why Women Veterans Don't Claim the Title
Higgins' research identified five themes that explain this phenomenon. Together, they paint a picture of what happens when a woman's service is systematically made invisible — by institutions, by society, and eventually, by herself.
The first theme is the gap between why women join and the reality they encounter. Women enter the military with ideals about service, opportunity, and equality. What many find is a culture that consistently positions them as secondary — questioned, doubted, and required to prove their legitimacy in ways their male peers are not.
The second theme is the military experience itself — specifically, the way sexism and gender harassment shape how women relate to their own service. When your time in uniform is marked by having to fight for the right to be taken seriously, it becomes complicated to claim that identity with pride. The service was real. The sacrifice was real. But the experience was also painful in ways that make it hard to hold both truths at once.
The third theme is the military's view of women — and how women internalize it. The research found evidence of what Higgins calls "unconscious sexism" — the way women veterans absorb the message that they are not quite the same as "real" veterans, and begin to act accordingly. Not claiming parking spots. Not correcting people who assume the veteran in the family is a husband. Not wearing the title because no one seems to expect it.
The fourth theme is the most painful: "I am a veteran, but it's not my identity." Women in the study expressed pride in their service while simultaneously distancing themselves from the veteran label — in part because the cultural image of a veteran does not look like them. The veteran in the public imagination is male, often white, often combat-experienced. Women who served in support roles, administrative roles, or non-combat specialties frequently questioned whether their service "counted" enough to claim the title.
The fifth theme is finding community — and how the absence of it accelerates invisibility. When women veterans cannot find other women who share their experience, they lose the mirror that reflects their identity back to them. Community is not just comfort. It is confirmation. It is how identity gets reinforced.
The Cost of Invisibility
When women veterans do not claim their identity, they also do not claim what comes with it — the benefits, the networks, the professional credibility, and the sense of belonging that veteran status provides. They leave resources on the table. They leave rooms where their voice is needed. They leave their own story untold.
And the story matters. Not just for them — for every woman currently in uniform who is watching to see whether her service will be honored when she gets out.
The OWNIT™ Principle: Own Your Story
The first pillar of the OWNIT™ Framework is Own Your Story — and it was built precisely for this moment. Owning your story does not mean performing your service for others' validation. It means refusing to let someone else's limited imagination define what a veteran looks like.
You served. That is not a footnote. It is the foundation.
The research is clear: the forces that push women veterans toward invisibility are external — cultural, institutional, and social. But the decision to step back into visibility is yours. And it starts with the simplest, most radical act: saying, without apology, I am a veteran. And everything I am was built on that.