The ban on women serving in frontline infantry roles alongside male soldiers is to be reviewed, the Ministry of Defence announced yesterday.

The last time that this issue was examined in any official capacity was in 2002 when the Service chiefs and ministers decided to maintain the policy of using only male personnel in close-combat roles. Women have always been barred from serving in infantry battalions, the Royal Armoured Corps, the Royal Marine General Service, the Household Cavalry and the RAF Regiment.

Because this taboo on equal treatment for women breaches European legislation, the Government is obliged to review the rules every eight years. At the moment just under 10 per cent of Armed Forces personnel — about 17,600 — are women.

Although there is no enthusiasm in the army hierarchy for women to take on a combat infantry role, the MoD review will have to take into account that hundreds of women in the Armed Forces now regularly serve in frontline jobs; and, with no obvious front lines in the campaign in Afghanistan, women are daily facing the risk of contact with the enemy.

Women can already serve in the Royal Artillery, whose members are frequently required to perform frontline functions. Women are serving as forward observation officers and forward air controllers, directing ground-attack aircraft to enemy targets. There are also women in the combat medical teams.

For physical reasons, commanders feel that women would find it difficult to go into battle carrying the full equipment and weapons — the average burden carried by a male soldier is more than 100lb. They also believe that the injuring or capture of a female soldier by the enemy might be too distressing for male comrades.

However, seven women have died in the two campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, five of them from enemy action.

Corporal Sarah Bryant, 26, of the Intelligence Corps, was killed in an explosion in Helmand, Afghanistan, in June last year, and Private Eleanor Dlugosz, 19, from the Royal Army Medical Corps, and 2nd Lieutenant Joanna Yorke Dyer, 24, from the Intelligence Corps, were killed by a roadside bomb in Basra in April 2007.

Staff Sergeant Sharron Elliott, 34, from the Intelligence Corps, was killed by an explosion while on a patrol boat on the Shatt al-Arab waterway near Basra in November 2006, and Flight Lieutenant Sarah-Jayne Mulvihill, 32, from the RAF, died in an attack on a Lynx helicopter in which she was a passenger over Basra in May 2006.

The two other women who have died were Lance Corporal Sarah Holmes, 26, from the Royal Logistic Corps, as a result of a traffic accident at an airbase used by the RAF for Iraq operations in Qatar in October 2007, and Staff Sergeant Denise Rose, 34, of the Royal Military Police, who committed suicide in Basra in October 2004.

At present, 70 per cent of army jobs are open to women, compared with 71 per cent in the Royal Navy — submarines and the Royal Marines in an infantry role still being taboo — and 97 per cent in the RAF. There are female fighter pilots, and only the RAF Regiment, which guards airbases and patrols outside the perimeter hunting for enemy positions, remains barred to women.

A spokesman for the MoD said yesterday: “Servicewomen are currently excluded from roles where there is a requirement to deliberately close with and kill the enemy face to face.”

The latest review is to be conducted by Brigadier Richard Nugee, the Army's director of manning. It is expected to be completed early next year.

A soldier from 38 Engineer Regiment working with the 2nd Battalion The Rifles was killed on Saturday by an explosion near Sangin in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. His next of kin have been informed. He was the 161st member of the Armed Forces to have died in Afghanistan since 2001.

The MoD also named a soldier killed in Helmand on Friday as Fusilier Petero “Pat” Suesue, 28, a Fijian serving with the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. He died from a gunshot wound on a foot patrol near Sangin.

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