Keeping women in uniform
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 23, 2009
THE statistics cited by the Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Houston, on the employment of women in the services show that military careers remain overwhelmingly a male preserve. Speaking at the launch of the action plan for the recruitment and retention of women, Air Marshal Houston noted that women were a little more than one-eighth of service personnel, compared with more than a third of the Australian workforce. Women are more common in the navy (18 per cent) and air force (17 per cent) than in the army (10 per cent). A quarter of a century after the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act, and the elimination of explicit barriers to women's employment in other parts of the economy, that is not a particularly good record.There remains a mystique about the services as a male preserve, yet women have served Australia in uniform almost from the beginning, as nurses. Women's units of the three services were formed during World War II. Further changes in society's attitudes to women's roles have forced change on the ADF. All but certain combat roles are now open to them. The Minister for Defence Support, Greg Combet, suggested last September that even this restriction should be removed. He met stiff resistance from former service personnel and others who spoke disapprovingly of the possibility of women taking part in night parachute jumps, or route marches carrying a 50-kilogram mortar baseplate. The example of Israel's armed forces - the Middle East's most effective, where it is assumed without question that women will take combat roles - is apparently not persuasive in Australia.Though we do not suggest women would flock to join combat units if they could, that lingering prejudice probably explains why joining the ranks is not in the forefront of women's minds: of every 20 women who show some interest in recruitment, 19 think twice and abandon the idea. Among men who show a similar interest, the recruitment rate is one in every 11. A hopeful sign that things are changing is the proportion of women among gap-year recruits, a recent innovation for high-school leavers. 37 per cent are women - more than the workforce as a whole.Personnel management is not something a military culture manages well. The requirements of discipline make service processes unyielding. Women must struggle to gain acceptance perhaps harder even than in the outside workforce. But as we have noted before, if the services are to attract enough recruits to match their personnel quotas, they must adapt to society's expectations of fairness and equity - including gender equity. The action plan is a worthwhile beginning.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald