Disclaimer:- in my World War IV series (we are in WW III right now) women get equal billing at the front with men..... but that is fiction.Depends on what you mean by 'combat' - in Afghanistan, for example, nearly 90 Canadian soldiers died in action and 1 was a woman - accidentally caught in an ambush during a re-supply run.
There are women pilots of attack aircraft and such and certainly nobody could argue that a ship at sea under attack is not 'in combat' - HOWEVER ....... when the chips are down, it is always men who are called upon to stand up and be counted, and the ships etc will soon be denuded of women and men will replace them at the sharp end.
So it's Men are this
And Men are that,
And mongrels get be'ind...
But it's PLEASE to walk in front, SIR,
When there's trouble on the wind.
Why is the Australian military weak at the moment and considered so both internally and externally - well - apart from nobody wanting to find self in the position of a Ben Roberts-Smith and cop extreme stress for life over it - young men are simply not interested any more in being shoved out of the way to cater to 'inclusion' and such... and then being called upon to be at the sharp end when it actually counts.
Let me remind you - the hero Dick Winter, during that assault in 'The Island' (the country around Eindhoven, Holland surrounded by rivers) shot first and asked no questions - in the series his first SS victim being a teenaged boy..... and in Normandy he had no arguments about his clear knowledge of Spiers killing prisoners..... which was, BTW, the order to Airborne who had to move fast to secure their objectives - Carentan was the D-Day objective for the 101 - they took it against a single company of Fallschirmjaegeren on 11th June... again you saw in the series a blast confused German being shot on sight....
It's not all beer and skittles.... and hero or villain is very subjective and open to argument.
When The Real Big One comes - and it looks not far off given the uncontrolled antics of certain groups across the world..... it will be your sons and grandsons who will be first called upon to take the load...... your daughters etc will run a distant last. So get with it.
Peacetime militaries are know for some odd things... a look at air shows demonstrates that some countries, such as France, are still somewhat locked into the idea that their strike aircraft should be able to fight a colonial war... and all this guff about women this and women that and trannies etc - has no real place in direct combat.