The thing is, it's not a concious effort on the part of the people in the towns, it's a much harder hurdle, which is the assumption that soldiers are men, it's been ground into people since birth, from movies like Commando and Rambo to toys like GI Joe and Action man, I would be interested to find the percentage of people who actually realise that females play more than a support role nowadays. This is similar, in some ways, to the fact that people like Douglas Bader and the 633 Squadron are remembered during WW2, and yet people like Nancy Wake are probably unknowns to many people.