Women make up the fastest-growing group of all U.S. veterans, with San Antonio seeing the quickest growth among this population in the nation.
And yet, less than half of them are enrolled in their earned VA benefits.
The battle to help women enroll starts long before they ever set foot in a Veterans Affairs (VA) office.
For many, it starts with self-identifying as a veteran — something men do more willingly than women.
“Not every woman who served calls herself a veteran, or even knows that she’s a veteran. I meet women all across the country who will say, ‘I was in the military,’ but they stop short when it comes to being a veteran,” said Jacquelyn Hayes-Byrd, a U.S. Air Force veteran and executive director of the Center for Women Veterans at the VA. “If you raised your hand, if you wore that uniform, if you served this nation, you are a veteran. No one can take that away from you.”
About 45% of all women veterans are enrolled in their VA benefits, compared to 51% of male veterans.
The VA considers veterans to be those who served in the active military, naval, air or space service, and were discharged or released from service — except under dishonorable conditions — generally after at least 24 months of continuous service.
There is no requirement for needing to deploy abroad, or serve in combat, to be considered a veteran. Veterans are entitled to a range of benefits including disability payments, healthcare, education benefits, housing assistance and burial benefits.
It wasn’t until 2016 that the Department of Defense officially authorized women to serve in all combat roles, and some who served before that feel their service didn’t qualify them as a veteran the same way male service did.
Even Hayes-Byrd didn’t call herself a veteran, and she only enrolled in her own VA benefits three years ago.
“Back in the day, I didn’t see myself as a veteran,” she said. “I’m gonna save the VA for somebody who really needs the VA, ignoring the fact that you know my ears are falling off, my arms hurt, my knees hurt. I was trying to save it for somebody who really needed it, not thinking that I needed it, too.”
For others, the trauma they endured in the military made them want to sever all ties with the service once they got out. According to the most recent VA report, 1 in 3 women and 1 in 50 men reported experiencing Military Sexual Trauma (MST) to their VA provider.
“I was just really traumatized by it. So when I got out, I just left and didn’t look back. I didn’t even care that I was a veteran,” San Antonio U.S. Air Force veteran Larissa Martinez said at a summit in San Antonio this weekend.
Martinez said that even after her eight years in the military, she also didn’t identify as a veteran when she got out. The trauma she experienced in the Air Force caused her to distance herself from military-affiliated organizations like the VA, even though they could have helped her as she struggled with housing, mental health and employment, she explained.
“It’s just, more so, the association of the trauma — and are you going to be re-traumatized by going back into the same environment?” Martinez said as to why she didn’t enroll in her VA benefits.
San Antonio’s veteran population
When the VA’s Center for Women Veterans kicked off its national initiative to reach the over 1 million women veterans who are not currently receiving their VA benefits, they chose San Antonio for the conversation.
“We have the fastest-growing female veteran population in the entire country. So I’m thankful that the Center for Women Veterans decided, smartly, to start here,” San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said.
A U.S. Air Force and Iraq War veteran herself, Jones is the first female mayor of a major Texas city to have served in combat. She said initiatives like this are especially important in light of the messaging from President Donald Trump’s administration about women who serve.
“When I hear about the current leadership at the Pentagon that disparages the service of anybody that’s not white and male, it has a deleterious effect on others seeing their ability to serve and do well in an organization that really needs diversity of thought and lived experiences to make sure we’re addressing our nation’s challenges,” Jones said.
Jones said she wants to work with the VA to secure funding for a planned new VA hospital and psychedelic trials to treat combat-related PTSD here in San Antonio.
Jones also has signaled she plans to revisit a newly passed city ordinance that bans most landlords from rejecting veterans who pay rent with a federal housing voucher, hoping to make all local landlords accept the vouchers.
The VA will now travel to four more U.S. regions after San Antonio’s southwest regional summit for veterans from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arizona.
While the two-day summit highlighted the contributions that more than 2.1 million women veterans have made to the U.S. military, the overwhelming sentiment was that the VA needs to connect more women with their benefits.
Some women at the summit said they were aware of how beneficial their benefits could be, and they even helped their U.S. military spouses enroll, but they didn’t enroll themselves.
“As women veterans, we’re really good at taking care of everybody else. We’re caregivers. We’re planners. We’re problem-solvers. But sometimes we’re not so good at taking care of ourselves,” Hayes-Byrd said.
How trauma affects care
Laura Koerner, now the chairwoman of the Texas Veterans Commission, was one of those veterans who helped others before she helped herself.
She and her husband both served in the U.S. Navy, moving to San Antonio after their service and Koerner said she helped her husband file his disability claim with the VA years before she filed her own. It wasn’t until she was already working at the state veterans commission that a colleague encouraged her to finally file.
The goal of the summit, titled Boots on the Ground for Boots on the Ground, was to meet women veterans where they are.
According to a 2026 study by the VA, an estimated 38% of women service members and veterans report experiencing military sexual trauma.
“We can’t ignore the fact that some women have had … traumas coming out of the military. So that immediately makes them want to kind of forget their service and not be around other veterans,” Koerner said. “So we try to give safe spaces for women with other women veterans, run by women.”
Women veterans are less likely to be found in the VFWs or American Legions that many male veterans frequent.
The Texas Veterans Commission created its own Women Veterans Program to connect the more than 200,000 women veterans in Texas with the resources they need.
Ten years after she got out of the military, Martinez also created a space for women veterans based in San Antonio. In 2019, she founded Circle of Arms, a nonprofit advocating for mental health support for veterans, women and minority communities.
She lost her own father, a Vietnam veteran, to suicide after his battle with PTSD, and she has worked to use Circle of Arms to de-stigmatize talking about mental health issues.
“The more we talk about it, it becomes a natural part of conversation, and we get the resources and services we need,” Martinez said.
After her military service, she finally realized her VA benefits were something she earned through sacrifice and service, not a handout. She also said that as a person of color and a woman, she struggled to find spaces that resonated with her and her experience in the service.
“We have to create our own space. That’s why most of these women organizations are like, ‘Well, we can’t find it.’
“Let’s go create it,” Martinez said.
Women are still the minority in the military, she explained, and there is much more work to be done to be inclusive of women in the service. To better reach women veterans, both the VA and TVC said some changes are as small as phrasing.
“We changed our verbiage … with our campaigns,” Koerner said. “We ask, ‘Have you served in the military?’ because we’ll get more ‘yes-es’ when we ask that than if we ask, ‘Are you a veteran?’”
At the end of the day, women’s service is deserving of their benefits, she said.
“Those benefits aren’t charity; they aren’t favors. They are part of our nation’s promise to the men and women who served, and accepting them honors your service,” Koerner said.
“Women veterans have helped shape generations of our armed forces. We have led, we’ve deployed, we’ve commanded, cared for others. We’ve also broken barriers and opened doors for those who follow.”
The San Antonio Report’s military and veterans coverage is supported by Report for America.
