1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Hello Girls Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2018 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war against Germany. As a historically neutral nation, the United States was unprepared to fight a technologically modern conflict overseas. The United States called upon American Telephone and Telegraph (referred to in this section as AT&T ) to provide equipment and trained personnel for the Army Signal Corps in France. AT&T executives in Army uniform served at home under the provisions of the Act entitled An Act for making further and more effectual provision for the national defense, and for other purposes. , approved June 3, 1916 (referred to in this section as the National Defense Act of 1916 ), which allowed for the induction of individuals with specialized skills into a reserve force. (2) When General John Pershing sailed for Europe in May of 1917 as head of the American Expeditionary Forces (referred to in this section as the AEF ), he took telephone operating equipment with him in recognition of the inadequacy of European circuitry and with the understanding that telephones would play a key role in battlefield communications for the first time in the history of war. (3) From May to November of 1917, the AEF struggled to develop the telephone service necessary for the Army to function under battlefield conditions. Monolingual infantrymen from the United States were unable to connect calls rapidly or communicate effectively with their French counterparts to put calls through over toll lines that linked one region of the country with another. The Army found that the average male operator required 60 seconds to make a connection. That rate was unacceptably slow, especially for operational calls between command outposts and the front lines. (4) During this time, in the United States, telephone operating was largely sex-segregated. Hired for their speed in connecting calls, women filled 85 percent of the telephone operating