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MND 2019

dapaterson said:
Our best marketing is serving CAF members.  If women in the CAF have negative experiences, it acts as a deterrent to future generations to serve.

Serious question: Is this quantifiably true?
 
Ill fitting equipment leads to increased release rates for injury.

And as I recall ( been a while since I reviewed literature) referral from friends / family remains a principal source of "why I joined the CAF".
 
Eye In The Sky said:
So I don't see this as a "why we can't recruit 25% females" issue.  Retention issue?

Probably because the CF is seen as a bunch of rapists with OP Operation Honour starting at almost the same time. We all know that it isn't the case but everything makes the news which makes it bad optics.

 
Ostrozac said:
If we, as a nation, are in fact actually serious about having a military that reflects the diversity of the Canadian public, then conscription cannot be dismissed out of hand. Especially since the military seems incapable of attracting, recruiting and retaining sufficient volunteers to hit diversity targets despite years of being directed to do so.

If we are not serious, and all of this diversity stuff is just posturing that should be given some lip service then ignored, then we will be fine keeping to the status quo.

A compromise might be a hybrid force as used by France during the Cold War — a large conscript force of indifferent quality, coupled with a small professional force for expeditionary warfare.In the Canadian context, the conscript force can be used as a showcase for everything good and proper about Canadian values, the professional force can focus on being lethal to our enemies.

We already do this, it's called CANSOFCOM  ;D
 
As with Board Gender Quotas, there's a right and wrong way to go about it....


Skirting the issue - How to deal with board gender quotas

And how not to

IT’S LIKE smoking; ultimately only a hard intervention made people change,” says Jochem Overbosch, an executive recruiter in Amsterdam. As with bans on lighting up indoors, he says, so too with mandatory quotas for women on company boards, which the Dutch Parliament voted for this month after softer targets failed to move the needle much. Employers say they approve. Assuming all goes to plan, the Netherlands will join seven European countries (and California) in replacing the carrot of “please” with the stick of “or else” to increase gender diversity.

Will it make a difference? Quotas with consequences for firms—such as fines in Italy or delisting in Norway—have increased women’s boardroom presence. Firms with more women seem to work better, with higher attendance and tougher monitoring of management. But no discernible impact on company performance has been identified. And the hoped-for trickle-down effect—whereby more female board members would swell the ranks of female executives—has yet to materialise.

Still, quotas are here to stay. No country has lifted those put in place so far (though the Dutch insist theirs are temporary). Best practice is a work in progress, but some dos and don’ts are becoming clear. Formalising selection processes to avoid a shortlist of chairman’s chums, for example by hiring an external search firm, as most British firms but only two-fifths of those in America do, is a good idea; it helps avoid inadvertent double standards. So is broadening selection criteria away from a multitude of narrow ones, such as years of executive experience or industry expertise. Ensuring that more than one woman makes it onto the shortlist also helps; research has shown that a lonely shortlisted woman (or representative of a minority) has little chance of getting the job.

Firms should avoid seeking a “pink unicorn” who ticks all conceivable boxes, recommends Laura Sanderson of Russell Reynolds, an executive-search firm. Spreading the desired skills over a number of future appointments makes it easier to find female candidates with at least some of them (or male ones, for that matter). Short, fixed terms for board members make renewal easier. This helps explain why in Britain, which has espoused them, boards are 30% female whereas in America, which has not, progress has flagged, despite corporate professions of gender equality.

Critics say boards are the wrong thing to focus on—a symptom of workplace gender inequality, not its cause. A study just published by Zoë Cullen of Harvard and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of the University of California, Los Angeles, highlights this. The authors studied promotion at a large Asian bank and found that men with male superiors rose up the hierarchy faster than those with female ones. Women managers do not appear to be similarly partial to female underlings, which may help explain why female board quotas have no effect on management’s gender mix.

The Dutch quota requires 30% of seats at large listed firms to be occupied by women. This translates to an extra 66 female board members, on top of the 122 who occupy such positions already, estimates Mijntje Lückerath from Tilburg University. Annet Aris, herself a member of several boards, admits the new law is “a lot of noise for a small group of women”. But, she adds, it is “still a very important signal”.

And signals matter, not least to ESG investors, who care about firms’ environmental, social and governance performance as well as their bottom-line. Helpfully, gender diversity on boards is easier to pin down than most ESG metrics. It is becoming ever harder to skirt.
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/12/12/how-to-deal-with-board-gender-quotas
 
Good2Golf said:
Serious question: Is this quantifiably true?

This PhD paper may not fully answer your question, but it looked interesting... and scary:

Soldiering in the Canadian Forces: How and Why Gender Counts!

Lynne Gouliquer, Department of Sociology
McGill University, Montreal
2011

"Under the circumstances, the misogynist behaviours and attitudes of male soldiers create an alienating environment and place barriers in the path of female soldiers tying to attain a fundamental quality of good soldiering. In summary, the preceding quotations indicate the presence of a generally unwelcoming and sometimes hostile atmosphere toward women. They reveal a workplace environment underpinned by misogynist undercurrents. Participants also discussed a particular type of harassment that speaks to the heterosexist nature of the hegemony in the military."

https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/QMM/TC-QMM-96779.pdf
 
Dimsum said:
That's still a thing in 2019 (almost 2020)?!

I can believe it. I was asked by someone who released about 10 years ago how the integration with women is going. And I heard grumblings of angry disbelief at the annual dinner from someone who served in the 70s and 80s when he saw an air force officer wearing a kilt in our regimental tartan.
 
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