There shouldn’t be a reason why someone from an ethnic minority background, female, trans, muslim, gay etc etc should be any less predisposed to wanting to join the military.
Numbers will never be equal, but they ought to be able to represent society more or less.
I think by the time you’ve got to recruitment it’s way, waaaay too late. Cadets is one of the best tools they’ve got, engagement with kids, a lot of it is image. That’s why I have little time for people whinging about pictures of women or ethnic minorities being disproportionately used in recruitment ads.
The numbers speak for themselves, white men don’t perceive an issue with joining the services, other groups perhaps do. It’s them that the targeting should go towards. That’s positive action in a nutshell. Turning away white men from roles though being white men? That’s criminal.
Some communities have the parental desire for their children to enter the professions such as medicine, law, accountancy etc, not joining for the chance to be suppliers or RAF Regiment etc.
The problem that the RAF, and indeed any large organisation has with meeting diversity quotas is that there’s not enough people in the targeted minority groups living in the United Kingdom to go around for all of the organisations to have their fair share.
Plus, who wants to join the Armed Forces of the UK anyway? Either you are keen to be a soldier, in which case you admit it to nobody, least of all anyone in the armed forces when you do turn up for Day 1 of Week 1 of Basic Training (or indeed on your retirement speech), or you join as a last resort of employment e.g. you’ve done a completely useless degree and are in debt to your parents and society to the tune of several thousand pounds, or there’s three million unemployed people.
The latter scenario is less likely: these days there’s plenty of work for meat puppets that no self-respecting robot would touch with a cattle prod.
We have to accept that an Armed Forces career is not, and has never been something British parents want their children to do, no matter what part of society they come from.
The other problem I have with diversity training and quotas is that it sticks labels on people that determine their sex or ethnicity to be their main characteristic of their identity, preventing us from seeing them primarily as your friends or workmates.
I remember a period in between the old prejudices and the new social engineering, when we all got along with each other reasonably well, but we were all young then: now the broad minds and narrow waists have long changed places.
But if the aim for an organisation is to represent society at large, which seems the only sensible thing to be aiming for, then by definition there is people to go around, that’s the whole point. As I’ve always said though, the AFCO is too late. If 90% of your applicants are white men then it stands to reason 90% if your military will be white men. The question to ask is why are the applicants not reflecting society. Currently there’s an awful lot of stable doors being slammed shut whilst the horse continues to canter down the road.
I don’t agree that the armed forces as a whole is seen as a shoddy career purely for meatheads, as you put it. Plenty of people gush endlessly about how proud they are of their kids serving. It’s also role specific. Pretty hard to see how being a nuclear engineer on a submarine, or a Typhoon pilot, or an army comms specialist would be looked down upon as a career of last resort. Plenty of Oxbridge graduates falling over themselves to commission into the military, some wildly competitive roles out there with jobs you can only do in the military.
Plenty of forgotten towns and cities outside of the south east where the military offers a springboard out of a dead end existence and can be the real makings of people. The Navy’s advertising about being made in the Royal Navy. Cheesy? Yes. Spot on? Also yes.
It takes time, it’s not even 25 years since the military finally allowed people who are openly gay to serve in the military. That’s mad. There’s people in their early 40s who couldn’t join the military because they failed the medical for being too gay, that’s not some backwards yesteryear, that’s recent history. Deepcut, the current revelations after the MeToo movement, the Reds etc etc still give off a sense of an unnecessarily macho and regressively based environment. That’d put off anyone.
~50% of society are women - the target is for 50% of the RAF to be women
if there is 10% of the population with X trait - then the target is for the RAF to have 10% people with X trait
where that trait could be gender, race, age, relgion or whatever other matrix.
the RAF/MOD are not trying to skew the numbers against society, simply make it more representative.
(consider Government - in the last 5 years we have had two female PMs and now have our first non-white PM - Politicians are a good mix of society but how close it is to representative i cannot say)
I disagree that this is the aim of the organisation, or that it should be.
“Our purpose is to protect the people of Britain, prevent conflict, and be ready to fight Britain’s enemies.” (AP1, p. 4, para. 1.)
Let us imagine for a moment that society at large is aging, overweight, unfit, selfish, not mentally robust, under the influence of Chinese state propaganda, and uninterested in fighting Britain’s enemies. Would representing such a society be the best way to achieve the purpose defined in AP1?
The huge levelling factors in the cooking pot are ability / aptitude. You can try to pull as many forward from XX group as you want, but if they don’t pass the test, tough. Yes, it would be great to have statistics matching the UK population (2021 Census = 51% female, 49% male), but you have to face realism, especially when you break those numbers down in ethnicity.
Back in the late 1980s, whilst there was no outright discrimination on the specified recruitment targets, but the recruitment “standard” for OASC Board Grade (BG) dropped as the financial year / academic year moved on & recruitment tgts had to be met. Similarly, academic / motivational aspects declined.
For example, typically, most students got their degrees results in say Jun / Jul. Within that group, a lot had wanted to join the RAF as their primary career path. As they had probably attended OASC in say Apr / May, subsequent selection was on a high BG (the RAF could afford to be picky) + good degree + good motivation. Typically, this group would start at Cranwell in Sep.
Next intake might well have a bit of a mix, especially for those who maybe didn’t get the degree (or A Level) results that would have got them their #1 career path, but they still had good BG scores, (but not as high as the first intake) but were “less” motivated to a career in the RAF.
The final of intake of the FY / trg year would have lower BG scores (need to get recruitment translated into trg), probably weaker academic results (failed A level resits, or tried & failed to get employment on existing grades) & probably only had the RAF has a 2nd or 3rd choice.
With the system at the time, not unsurprisingly, the first time pass mirrored the “quality” trend that I have just outlined.
It’s interesting to look at our USA counterparts who have a much more diverse military. It’s down to the excellent prospects of entering the middle class that a career in the US military offers e.g. free college through GI bill etc
We don’t have anywhere near as generous benefits for military personnel which makes a career less desirable
In many cases yes. Not because they are black though. Partly because the test has been designed by successful white people so there is likely to be an element of unconscious bias there on how it’s developed and what it tests.
Partly also because, on the whole in society, white people come from better socio-economic backgrounds and can be better prepared for the tests as they currently stand.
But this is why it’s more than an RAF problem. The inequalities run deep in society and have a whole host of issues.
(Before anyone says it I’m also aware that white working class boys are less likely to go to uni than any other group, so it’s not black and white - pun intended)
It goes without saying that if you have a lower %% of the population for any particular group, then the top XX% taking an aptitude will be a smaller number than the same XX% for the group with the largest number. Simple statistics, nothing else. If, as we know, you start off with a reduced % of a group overall, the final output will be even smaller. That’s the realism.
Across all the groups, you could probably look at specific reasons why they would not necessarily want to join the Services - but targeting those reason / perceptions & being able to do something to significantly increase recruitment from those groups isn’t, IMHO, going to happen. For example, recruitment applications will never match the 51:49 female / male ratio.
How many within the UK population just about tolerate supervisors / managers within their workspace, but hate the idea of being given orders within the military? Pay isn’t everything, but getting the same dosh as - or in many cases, more than - a military person for the equivalent stable civvie 9-5 job works for a lot of people.
Which is where positive discrimination can be used in a lawful manner, you can hold workshops to assist those in underrepresented groups to get a leg up for the assessment process. (That’s what has been done in policing).
Something else which comes out of this is that if you are a young black male you are more likely to have been involved in crime (be it committing offences or having association) which will effect your vetting. Again not because you are black, but because you are more likely to have grown up in an inner city in a lower scoop-economic group. This is a real issue with Police diversity targets, a few years ago they were seriously talking about allowing you to join with a criminal record in more circumstances because it was a real blocker for recruitment. (The height limit was removed for being a similar unconscious racial bias).
As @Farmerdan says this issue goes way beyond any single organisation and until more is done to level up society it will cause issues for individual groups.
Hmmm, surely most of the skills / aptitude tests that require hand / eye / coordination / response time, etc, can’t possibly be linked to unconscious bias? Social background probably has little to do with this - you’ve got it or you haven’t - unless you have the latest PS whatever to practice with.
One of my trainee pilot group at RAF Church Fenton (when the OASC tests included proper “hands -on” mechanical kit rather than the new-fangled CBT stuff) had done zero preparation - & of course, computer gaming at the time was non-existent. He was an ex-BT engineer, no flying background at all, & passed the tests with more than flying colours - at Church Fenton, he was first to go solo, first to complete other phases & he finished very near the top of the course. He went to Valley, & then as a rising star, got sent to Jags (the top guys went to either Harriers or Jags at the time. Sadly, he made one mistake on the Jag OCU, he flew through a snow shower, & hit the ground. RIP Andy.
If the great British public were pro-military, then we wouldn’t have suffered decades of defence cuts which have rendered our Armed Forces incapable of maintaining either a large operation, or a sustained one, in addition to the part we play in NATO’s defence of Europe. We need high-tech equipment, but that is there to supplement and enhance the capability of mass forces, not to replace it.
Also, we would have public support for universal military or civil service, completion of which actually does benefit young people upon their return to civilian life and reserve service. The Finns have a good model for this in their country.
Individual families in Britain might be proud of their children who are serving, but it hasn’t stopped the degradation of our military effectiveness. Once the war in Ukraine ends in a year yet to come, the rest of Europe will have to construct, man and maintain a Maginot Line in the East to stop a future invasion by the bad guys. Over the last year, we have seen how much men and materiel a real war uses up.
