Highlight 32/2024 – Women Network in Defence; Benefit for all

Ruzanna Abrahamyan, 10 September 2024

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Women in armed forces are more likely to face challenges because of strong gender stereotypes and less likely to feel involved in strategic processes.

An example of such stereotype is contradiction between strong defence, war-fighting roles  and women’s skills. However, this stereotype does not meet the realities of today, when women can serve in the military on an equal footing with men and fulfill their duty to the state. Meanwhile, even in more traditional war-fighting roles, technological advances mean that fewer infantry soldiers are needed, and upper-body strength has less of an impact on combat effectiveness. Moreover the increasing complexity of military operations demands personnel with specialized skills in a wide range of areas, such as languages, psychology, information technology and engineering.

In general, applying a gender perspective in defence is  very important from an operational, legal and moral standpoint for;

• Maintaining the highest levels of operational effectiveness since military operations in the modern world require versatility and variety of qualifications and resources.
• Ensuring that peoples’ needs are met in terms of security. Male and female needs and priorities often have different perspectives and can only be met through equal participation in the decision making, policy-creating and enacting processes.
• Diverse defence sector which enjoys greater public legitimacy.
• Protection of human rights since women’s security, economic empowerment and protection from human rights abuses cannot be achieved without women’s voices being heard and women being involved in peacebuilding. 
• Positive contribution to gender equality in the societies by challenging gender stereotypes and discrimination, etc.

Since women’s full participation in defence sector is necessary  in terms of promoting gender equality and for military effectiveness,  efforts aimed at the recruitment, retention and promotion of women are fundamental. 

Women networks are a useful resource to support women’s participation and leadership in the defence sector. Successful networking isn’t just about connecting with people: it’s about building a community to share experiences and ideas between officials of different ranks, shape collective thinking, solve problems and create opportunities for each other to  address barriers to women’s meaningful participation. Unfortunately, a lot of sources, such as LinkedIn data suggests gender gaps in online professional networks lead to men typically having larger networks and stronger networks than women.

Through desk research, we identified that there is not a unique model of women’s network, but that each network needs to be tailored to the cultural, contextual and institutional specificities. However, we can identify some key elements to build a successful women’s network: 

• Engage sufficient resources and motivated people, cooperate.
• Obtain the relevant authorization to carry out activities (a network can be registered as a professional association, a civil society organization, established as an internal body of the security institution, etc.)
• Define clear and long term aims and objectives based on a vision and mission to build the networks credibility, sustainability and effectiveness. 
• Define  strategy,  priorities, workplan, structure, governance proceedings, membership and member’s roles, etc. to track progress in objectives.
• Allow women in the lowest as well as higher ranks to become members –for sustainable network, for accurate identification of challenges and needs, solutions, effective mentorship opportunities, meaningful participation.
• Allow men to join since gender stereotypes and challenges demands that men are addressed and engaged as agents of change, and senior leaders can serve as mentors.
• Communicate, be visible, spread the word.
• Enable flexible, accessible and voluntarily working environment for members and supporters.

To conclude, the challenges in achieving gender equality in defence sector are numerous and complex. Only multiple approaches can complement each other, ensure optimal success and become  factors for effective and sustainable change. Gender parity in the defence sector  can be advanced through both formal measures like quotas and policies, as well as through informal factors such as professional networks which rises awareness, positive attitudes toward issues, confidence, meaningful  participation thus improving  policies and practices.  When these success factors are present in Government policy, the efforts towards gender equality  in defence sector  are more likely to succeed.

Ruzanna Abrahamyan, Highlight 32/2024 – Women Network in Defence; Benefit for all, 10 September 2024, available www.meig.ch

The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the authors and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva.