Gender and the Armed Forces: People First

Interview with Major General Tammy L. Harris, Deputy Commander of the Canadian Air Force

There has been a cultural shift in the Canadian Armed Forces, says Canadian Major General Tammy L. Harris, from tolerating women as being “almost the same” as men to valuing them for the diversity of talents and perspectives they bring to the job. Promoting women’s contribution to peace and security is high on the OSCE’s agenda. Major General Harris visited the OSCE’s Forum for Security Co-operation at the invitation of the Serbian Chairmanship on 13 September 2017.

Why integrate a gender perspective into the military?

The simple answer to the question is that unless we know how men, women, girls or boys are affected differently and who among them is most at risk, at what time and place, the protection we provide may be unsuitable. For example, if a mission task is to provide security near a refugee camp, it is helpful to understand the role of women to collect firewood and water. These daily activities can put them in danger, particularly if they have to travel long distances.

During the Canadian engagement in Afghanistan, we weren’t able to engage with the women in the beginning, due to cultural limitations. We tried to talk to the elders, but we came to the realization that as long as we didn’t have access to half the population, we were not talking to the people who might have the most intelligence, who could tell us what things were like on the ground. So we started female engagement teams. They were part of the controls going out, always present, so as to gain trust from the community. This was a change in how we were doing and understanding things. It helped us when we were building schools, for example, to find out: are we putting them in the right places?  The whole process made our mission stronger and made us recognize the importance of integrating a gender perspective.

You are the first woman to hold the position of Deputy Commander of the Canadian Air Force: how has the situation for women in the military changed over time?   

It’s really been a long journey for women, a cultural change. It started with the nursing sisters in the Boer War in 1885. The Canadian Armed Forces was one of the first military forces to allow women to serve in all occupations and today we are setting ambitious goals to increase representation across all trades and ranks. Today, 15 per cent of Canadian Armed Forces members are women, and our objective is that in ten years, one in four will be a woman.

When I joined, my female colleagues and I fought for gender neutrality. We were fighting not to be seen differently from men. We wanted to prove that we could do the job. Over time, it became clear that, given the necessary training and dedication, both men and woman can do the job. And we came to realize: it’s OK to highlight the differences between people – whether it is male and female or people from different backgrounds or people with different experiences – because that’s what makes you stronger. I think that’s what makes Canada strong: we are a multicultural society, not a melting pot; we celebrate people’s differences. 

How important is leadership for gender mainstreaming?

When a top leader says “this important and we are doing it”, it permeates down. If you don’t have the support of leadership, it won’t go anywhere. We are privileged right now with the support we have from the Government of Canada and internally from our Chief of Defence Staff. They made it possible for our new Director for the Integration of Gender Perspectives, Sheila Ouellet, to come on board with her team. She works with three gender advisors in three key positions:  a strategic gender advisor, a gender advisor in our operational command and now a gender advisor also in our special operations command.

We have gender focal points deployed on all of our missions – currently 19 in total. Even if it’s a mission of two people, one of them has been identified as the gender focal point. It helps bring a gender lens to aspects that people wouldn’t have historically thought of or framed in that context. We try to promote that gender lens as widely as we can: to date 68,000 people have done the online course on our gender analysis tool – Gender Based Analysis Plus.

What is “Gender Based Analysis Plus”? 

The Government of Canada developed Gender Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) to implement the Beijing Platform for Action, as the analytical tool it uses to integrate a gender perspective into all of its legislation and policies.  The Department of National Defence has adopted it as well. GBA+ takes into account not only gender – men, women, boys and girls – but also things such as sexual orientation, education and socioeconomic status.

If, for example, we are procuring a ship, we do GBA+ analysis to determine whether we are disproportionality affecting certain segments of men and woman who might not be able to operate on this ship because of some factor. So if we are buying a jet, and we learn that in order to fly the jet you need to be 6 feet 6 inches tall and weigh 250 pounds, that would probably eliminate 95 per cent of the people in the air force. It’s really a matter of looking at the effects of your decisions, of asking questions that we probably would have asked anyway, but now it’s more of a formal process.

GBA+ played a huge role in the development of our new Defence Policy, “Strong, Secure, Engaged”. Gender perspectives were incorporated throughout and there is a strong section about men and women in uniform. The guiding philosophy is “People first, mission always” – it used to be the reverse. We’ve even gone a step further than celebrating diversity. It’s really about inclusiveness.  That is our goal in senior leadership: to ask what every individual person can bring to the job we need to do and to pick out those different characteristics that together will make us stronger.