Why weren’t the women armed with phasers on Star Trek?

 

SILVER SCREEN HUB:

Why weren’t the women armed with phasers on Star Trek? Ah, the eternal conundrum that arises when you rewatch TOS with 21st-century eyes and realize: wait a second, why is Ensign Ricky carrying a phaser the size of a toaster oven while Lt. Uhura, who can recalibrate frequencies on the fly and once held off Klingons with only her sass, is usually unarmed?

 

The truth is layered in technicolor folds of 1960s network television, studio politics, gender roles, and yes—budget constraints that could make even the tightest Ferengi purse look generous.

Let’s start with the surface-level answer: security was largely a man’s game in Star Trek: The Original Series. The guys with the red shirts, who beamed down and tragically never beamed back up, were generally big, square-jawed, anonymous men, whose job was to die so Kirk could look anguished and Spock could raise an eyebrow. These were the guys who carried the phasers. The women—yeomans, communications officers, botanists, historians—were often given tricorders, mini-skirts, and the heavy-lifting task of humanizing Starfleet.

 

But dig deeper, and you’ll find a curious pattern: the roles women played were the reason they weren’t armed. Security was written as a male-coded job. Women, even those with rank, were rarely depicted in combat roles because television at the time was still very much beholden to post-war gender norms. Even though Star Trek talked about a utopian future, it was filmed in an era where studio execs winced at the idea of a woman firing a weapon unless she was an alien seductress or, heaven forbid, showed too much autonomy.

 

Now, to be fair, there were moments when women on the show did carry phasers—Lt. Uhura in “Mirror, Mirror” comes to mind, all fierce elegance and controlled fire. Lt. Marla McGivers, the history buff who falls for Khan (we’ll talk about her taste in men another time), is briefly seen near phasers, though notably passive in using them. And yes, Yeoman Mears was armed in “The Galileo Seven,” but by and large, these were the exceptions—memorable precisely because they were rare.

 

Budget also played a sly role. Those animated phaser beams didn’t come cheap. That distinctive blue shimmer? It had to be manually rotoscoped onto each frame, which meant fewer shots fired meant fewer dollars spent. So who got the honor of pulling the trigger? Typically Kirk, Spock, or security personnel with names like “Lt. Martinez” and “Corporal Dead-in-Three-Minutes.”

 

Let’s not forget the phaser props themselves. The iconic type-2 phaser, the pistol-shaped version, was often reserved for heroes. More often, you’d spot the smaller type-1 version—essentially a futuristic remote control—snugly tucked into their belts. Even then, those were distributed sparingly. So you might find yourself asking why half the away team is unarmed on a hostile planet. The answer: the show didn’t have enough props. Literally. Sometimes there were only two or three functional phasers on set. It wasn’t a tactical choice; it was a prop department scramble

 

That said, Gene Roddenberry did want to showcase progressive ideals, but he was also negotiating the realities of NBC’s standards and the expectations of a male-dominated TV landscape. It’s no coincidence that by the time we get to The Next Generation, you see women in security roles—Tasha Yar, Ro Laren, and of course, Kira Nerys and Major Kira over on Deep Space Nine. The shift was slow, but it came.

 

Still, the original series remains a fascinating contradiction—pioneering in its vision, yet shackled by the very present limitations of its time. Women on Trek were brilliant, resourceful, and dignified. But phasers? Apparently, those were a bridge too far—until the future finally caught up with itself.