New Report on the Combat Exclusion and Gender Equality

This report brings together decades of data on gender integration in the New Zealand and Canadian Defence Forces. This report shows evidence that lifting the combat ban does not have significant positive impacts on three core indicators of gender equality: recruitment (both generally and into combat roles), retention, and promotion rates.

The report first looks at the assumed positive impacts associated with removing the combat exclusion:

The report then provides evidence of recruitment, retention and promotion rates in the New Zealand and Canadian Defence Forces since they integrated women. The data indicate little to no improvement in any of these indicators. This disrupts arguments that removing the combat exclusion will break the ‘brass ceiling’ and also raises broader questions about how limited gender integration efforts have been in these two defence forces. The graph below shows the percentage of women in the Canadian Armed Forces. Note that the numbers have largely plateaued for decades despite the integration of women into combat roles, as well as other efforts to address gender equality in the forces.

Percentage of women in the Canadian Armed Forces

The conclusion: removing the combat exclusion is not a panacea for achieving gender equality in the military. The belief that removing the combat exclusion will lead to equality places extreme pressures on incoming women to ‘be the solution.’ Indeed, research indicates that attempting to integrate women into traditionally male-dominated roles without systematic efforts to improve the culture or change leadership practices can set women up for hardship and failures. Read the full report here.