Gender Integration in NATO Military Forces

Cross-national Analysis

Lana Obradovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409464761
• eBook ISBN: 9781317130147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Numerous states have passed gender integration legislation permanently admitting women into their military forces. As a result, states have dramatically increased women's numbers, and improved gender equality by removing a number of restrictions. Yet despite changes and initiatives on both domestic and international levels to integrate gender perspectives into the military, not all states have improved to the same extent. Some have successfully promoted gender integration in the ranks by erasing all forms of discrimination, but others continue to impede it by setting limitations on equal access to careers, combat, and ranks. Why do states abandon their policies of exclusion and promote gender integration in a way that women's military participation becomes an integral part of military force? By examining twenty-four NATO member states, this book argues that civilian policymakers and military leadership no longer surrender to parochial gendered division of the roles, but rather support integration to meet the recruitment numbers due to military modernization, professionalization and technological advancements. Moreover, it proposes that increased pressure by the United Nations to integrate gender into security and NATO seeking standardization and consistency on the international level, and women's movements on the domestic level, are contributing to greater gender integration in the military.

Winner of the 2015 ERGOMAS "Best Book in Civil-Military Relations" Award.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The military has traditionally been an all-male dominion. While there are many historical examples of women such as Joan of Arc, Margaret Corbin and an all-female Russian 588th Night Bomber Regiment fighting wars and standing beside men, for centuries men made up the majority of recruits and held the highest ranks. Most often, women joined or were recruited during wartime to help fill multifarious positions, from secretaries and nurses to bomber pilots and snipers. Once a war was over, however, the women were sent home, with their accomplishments relegated to historical archives. Popular literature most often discusses women’s presence in the military and war in “sexier” roles as spies, saboteurs and nurses, while their combat experience has been airbrushed out of our collective memory.

Following World War II and during the early days of the Cold War, women were incorporated into the military services in most states on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but the presence, role and impact of these women were rather insignificant. In the majority of states, women performed their duties in administrative, personnel and medical positions. They were prohibited from attending military academies and were not allowed to scale the ranks to command levels. Most states had strict laws and regulations limiting the number of women soldiers and professional positions open to them.

However, since the mid-1970s and early 1980s this trend that had persisted for most of humankind’s history has started to change worldwide. Numerous states have passed legislation permanently integrating women into their military forces and have dramatically increased women’s numbers and the extent of their service. The number of female soldiers in NATO forces increased from 30,000 in 1961 to approximately 300,000 today.¹ Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990–91 included more than 40,000 U.S. women soldiers and since 2003, 160,500 American female soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East, meaning one in seven soldiers is a woman.² In 1970 the number of women in the U.S. military was a meager 1.4 percent, but by 1980 it had increased sixfold to 8.3 percent, and today women make up 15 percent of U.S. forces. Similarly, Spain increased its number of women in the military from 5.8 percent in 2001 to 13.47 percent in 2006, while Portugal’s numbers rose from 6.6 percent to 12 percent. The change is particularly evident in NATO’s new member states in Eastern Europe, such as Latvia, which boasts 17 percent, Slovenia 15 percent, and Hungary 20 percent.³ In fact, all NATO member states, with the exception of Iceland, since it does not have a standing army, have passed legislation permanently integrating women into their military ranks, and assigning functions and duties traditionally performed by men.

Not only are the numbers increasing but the roles that women play in the armed forces are expanding. The impact of these changes is best illustrated by former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman J. Vessey’s observation that “the influx of women has brought greater change to the U.S. military than the introduction of nuclear weapons” (Carrol Hall 1993). Since the passage of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in October 2000, and 1820 in June 2008, states are legally bound to both recognize the importance of the role played by women in conflicts and in peace-building, and to increase women’s numbers in peacekeeping, conflict prevention and resolution, prevention of sexual violence, as well as enforce gender equality on all levels of decision-making. Even though the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives (NCGP) was established in 1976 and has provided advice and information to member states regarding employment of servicewomen, in 2009 its mandate was expanded to include supporting the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820. The NATO multinational force deployed women for the first time in peace-enforcing and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. In Iraq, United States and British uniformed female soldiers served as members of search teams, while their Canadian counterparts continue to patrol check points in Afghanistan. The alliance continues to support gender initiatives through a variety of conferences and reports on integrating gender dimensions into NATO operations, and a recent report shows that today “NATO nations are therefore strongly encouraged to employ female personnel within the full spectrum of their operations”⁴ (NCGP 2007: 11). Whether it is peacekeeping and peace-enforcing operations or new wars and missions fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, NATO member states have been seeking to reform their military services to integrate gender perspectives by passing policies that increase the quality of the experience for women in the armed forces.

Yet despite changes and initiatives on both domestic and international levels to integrate gender perspectives into the military, not all states have improved women’s status in their armed services to the same extent. Some have erased all legal obstacles to women’s progress in the military and have successfully promoted gender integration in the ranks, but others continue to impede it by setting limitations on women’s equal access to careers, combat, ranks, or by simply not seeking to change basic social and family friendly policies. Despite awarding a number of women medals of honor for their role in combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States Department of Defense continues to ban women from engaging in ground combat. While Italian women were integrated in 2000, today they occupy only 3.9 percent of positions in the Forze Armate. Although women have served in the Turkish military since the time of Ataturk, the state today allows women only to enter as officers or non-commissioned officers, and most serve in administrative and medical areas. Greece established its Ministry of Defense Gender Equality Office only in 2004 to collect data and seek to eliminate gender discrimination. Some, such as Denmark, France and Belgium, still lack gender advisers, while others, such as Romania, have no programs or policies for the recruitment and retention of women. Among the newest members of the alliance, Poland and Romania show the least commitment, with just 2.1 percent and 4.6 percent of women in the military, respectively.

This transformation of government policies regarding gender integration in the military, no matter how imperfect, inadequate and far from complete, shows that the end of the Cold War ushered a new era of civil–military relations in democratic North American and European states. Governments are undergoing a rather difficult process of finding a new and suitable role for their military institutions in order to improve their effectiveness, strength and values, while simultaneously seeking to reassess their interaction with the democratic society they claim to represent and protect, and results vary from one state to another.

What explains the degree to which different democratic NATO member states have integrated gender into their military services? Why are women increasingly being integrated into some states’ armed forces and not in others, despite an enormous organizational transformation, adaptation of facilities, change of physical prowess standards and interaction regulations—all very different from the integration into civilian employment where women have participated for many decades? What structural, institutional, cultural or international factors explain states’ military personnel policy on gender, and which factors are the most important?

Such a significant variation in gender integration and women’s participation in the military demands an explanation and much greater scrutiny. The last three decades have witnessed myriad social scientists and social commentators highlighting the reality of women in the military. It is not surprising that an intense public debate resulted in a significant increase in literature on the issue of gender integration in the military around the world. But what is surprising is that there are serious absences of empirical studies and comprehensive theoretical and comparative analysis in political science. It appears the state’s gender integration policy in the military has fallen through the cracks between our levels of analysis and our increasingly narrowed subfields. By examining 24 NATO member states, the aim of this book is to build a theoretical model that explains why states abandon their policies of exclusion, and promote gender integration in a way that women’s military participation becomes an integral part of military force.

It does so by drawing on both literature in international relations, in particular feminist security literature that questions systemic and gendered challenges of integration of women in highly masculine military institutions, and comparative gender policymaking literature that focuses on cross-national differences in policies that concern women’s participation in non-traditional occupations, and gender mainstreaming policies on an international level. The explanatory model is developed by relying on previously proposed models and conceptual categories developed by military sociologists that have most actively engaged in this research. This book offers the exploration of an understudied yet academically and policy-relevant issue and a new theoretical model that explains patterns of gender integration meant to address the imbalance between women and men in the military. It emphasizes the need for a more theoretically oriented understanding of gender as it entails the identification of the need for such a process, identification of domestic actors inside and outside government structures that are involved in subsequent policy design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, as well as international security context, international organizations and norms that influence that process.

No other scholarly work has done that in political science. It problematizes the realist state-centric analysis devoid of individuals and domestic political actors and processes, as well as the lack of studies of the impact that international organizations’ gender mainstreaming initiatives, military technological advancements, the changing nature of warfare and new non-contiguous battlefields have on states’ gender integration policies, and in turn, on the increasing number of women to serve in the military. Secondly, it sets out to clarify and operationalize concepts, and situate both the discussion and terminology within theoretical literature in comparative gender policymaking and international relations, particularly feminist security studies. Thirdly, although prior studies in military sociology provide us with umbrella categories, this book will seek to add necessary deductive rigor and test variables both quantitatively and qualitatively to eliminate a number of proposed hypotheses. This would then leave us with a more concise and parsimonious model. Fourthly, unlike all previous analysis, this book expands the study to include NATO’s new member states of Eastern Europe in the sample. More than a decade after becoming full members of the alliance, the lack of analysis of gender integration in Eastern European states has left us with a partial understanding of the policymaking process and the factors behind it. And lastly, by being the first project to empirically test international level variables, it offers a roadmap for the future analysis of gender mainstreaming in the military.

Defining Concepts

While a number of scholars have developed remarkable and seminal ways of analyzing gender issues in the military, there seems to be little conversation among scholars. Not only is the policy change neglected by the scholarship, but there seems to be little shared theoretical understanding of the subject and even less consensus regarding concepts, methodologies or even significance of questions posed. This lack of consensus has resulted in conceptual stretching, ambiguity, and methodological confusion. We end up having separate conversations, presenting papers and articles in separate and different roundtables and panels at academic conferences without much overlap and much needed scholarly debate and exchange that would allow us to place gender, women and military within the same theoretical and analytical framework. Yet, stable and a shared understanding of concepts and methodology provide a foundation of any research community. This book is a contribution to the field of security studies that have long neglected women and gendered perspectives. Stephen Walt defines security studies as “the study of the threat, use, and control of military force … [that is] the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the use of force affects individuals, states and societies, and the specific policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent or engage in war” (1991: 212). This most commonly cited definition of our field clearly demonstrates that security is not only about the use of force, but also about the way national governments plan to recruit military personnel, and ensure readiness and sustainability of that force. Studying gender and women in the military is therefore an essential, but overlooked part of that planning and policymaking project.

This is a comparative military personnel policy study, which means that it will aim to study states’ “course of action or inaction pursued under the authority of government” (Heidenheimer, Heclo and Adams 1983: 4) regarding gender integration. Unlike in any other profession, military recruitment and personnel policies are entirely monopolized by the state (Huntington 1957) and no other government institution controls lives, practices, images, and policy process as the military does. While bullets and wars do not discriminate, it is the state that clearly does, however, by holding a monopoly on the decision over who gets to hold the gun and protect the state as a legitimate member of the military forces. Historically and traditionally, the military has been closely linked to gender stereotypes, and states have often deliberately fostered a relationship between masculinity and military. Hence, it is impossible to study gender integration without studying the military as a hierarchical and traditionally masculine organization that stands in direct opposition to gender equality principles espoused by modern democratic societies. For much of our history and in most cultures, the responsibilities of a soldier have taken on “gendered” attributes in line with societal expectations regarding appropriate roles for women and men. This gendered definition of a soldier is constructed and learned, both within our societies and in the military, and is not defined by one’s biological sex.

The semantic problem is that males and masculinity, and women and femininity are confused and conflated, and the assumptions and expectations regarding the association between them are often wrong. Both women and men can have masculine and feminine characteristics and traits (Disler 2010), yet military ties to masculine characteristics are often perceived as antithetical and even hostile to feminine characteristics regardless of temporal or regional focus.

This book builds on the previous theoretical models studying women’s military participation (WMP), as it adopts some of their measurements and variables, for the sake of parsimony and consistency. Carreiras argues that we ought to “distinguish between those factors that concern women’s simple presence in the system, which are not responsible for relevant variation in the qualitative status of military women, and those referring to women’s qualified presence, which instead seem to influence gender integration to a reasonable extent” (2006: 127). Therefore, this book does not focus only on simple ratios, women’s percentages, and numerical representation, but rather on what she terms gender inclusiveness. I define this as the degree to which individual states have taken action to erase gender stereotypes, including passage of legislation, policies and programs to provide women with the same opportunities, rights and obligations in the military as men.

The measurement of the main dependent variable is amended to reflect policy changes since the original concept operationalization. The analysis will focus only on the political process of gender integration, and not on personnel interaction, soldier attitudes and “interpersonal dynamics” prior to or after gender integration policy has been legally passed by the state’s authorities.⁵ In other words, the study will not evaluate the effect that these policy changes might have had on the overall armed services, their effectiveness, unit cohesion and readiness. Although “policy” is to be distinguished from “problems”, meaning that state-sanctioned rules and regulations that govern employment, and address the aspirations and needs of women and men in the military forces, are not the same as implementation issues, this book also seeks to show that the two are often influenced by the same static views on the masculinity of the military profession.

Another term that is being increasingly used by policy scholars, policymakers and advocacy groups around the world is gender mainstreaming. Although the question of “mainstreaming” or the strategy of situating women’s issues in the middle of a larger international debate on development has been around since the mid-1980s (Razavi and Miller 1995; Parpart), the term itself became part of policymaking and policy scholarship after it was presented in the Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2000). This study will therefore adopt the official terminology offered by the Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women, whose responsibility is to support and monitor the implementation of it throughout the United Nations system. According to them, gender mainstreaming is:

a globally accepted strategy for promoting gender equality. Mainstreaming is not an end in itself but a strategy, an approach, a means to achieve the goal of gender equality. Mainstreaming involves ensuring that gender perspectives and attention to the goal of gender equality are central to all activities—policy development, research, advocacy/dialogue, legislation, resource allocation, and planning, implementation and monitoring of programmes and projects.⁶

The need to familiarize ourselves with this term also arises from the recent integration of gender perspective by Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security that clearly requires more women to enter both peacekeeping and peace-support operations. The Committee on Women in the NATO Forces (CWINF) that since 1976 has been in charge of offering and sharing information regarding the status, organization, conditions of employment and career possibilities for women in the armed forces of NATO member states, has even changed its own name during the writing of this book, to the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives to reflect its implementation of Resolutions 1325 and 1820. By changing the name, the alliance has shown its own commitment to the development of more effective ways to utilize women as a way to “promote, facilitate, support and monitor incorporation of gender mainstreaming in all NATO operation activities” (2003: 34).

While in recent times we have witnessed an increase in irregular forces, paramilitaries, rebel forces (Kaldor 1999), and corporate warriors (Avant 2005; Singer 2003), it is necessary to understand that this study will only analyze states’ military forces. Accord...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gender Integration in the Military: Conceptual and Theoretical Framework
• 3 Cross-National Analysis of Gender Integration Policies in NATO: Measuring and Comparing Gender Integration Policies
• 4 Gender Integration in the Original Members of NATO: Case Studies of the United States and Italy
• 5 Gender Integration in the New Members of NATO: Case Studies of Poland and Hungary
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index