Is the RAF Pausing Recruitment for White Men?

Deborah Haynes, security and defence editor at Sky News, has reported allegations from defence sources that this is the case. She includes information that the Head of Recruitment - a female senior officer - has resigned in protest at this. However, Haynes also reports that an RAF spokesperson has denied this saying that there are no policy changes for recruitment and RAF Engineer Officer, Kathy Morten, disputed this on Twitter showing videos of graduating RAF intakes which reveal that they are overwhelmingly white men. Of course, if the policy is new, videos of new recruits starting their training in the next few months would be more revealing. It is also significant that the defence sources cited speak of an ‘effective pause’ suggesting that this might not be an official policy but something that is happening in practice. No official spokesperson for the RAF addressed the reasons for the resignation of the Head of Recruitment although they do have a policy of not responding to questions about individuals.

Overall, then, it is unclear at the moment whether the RAF is effectively pausing recruitment for white men or not. If it is, this will likely be revealed in future months by reviewing graduate videos. At the moment, the best we can do is look at what the Ministry of Defence, the armed forces in general and the RAF in particular is saying about representation and their criteria for recruitment. Sky News reports the Ministry of Defence as having said:

"Operational effectiveness is of paramount importance and no one is lowering the standards to join the Royal Air Force. The RAF recruits for many professions and, like the rest of the armed forces, is determined to be a force that reflects the society it serves to protect."

The first sentence isn’t terribly helpful as ‘recruiting by race and sex’ is not the same thing as ‘lowering standards” but would represent a different kind of problem. There is no reason to think that any standards would be lowered by only recruiting Britons of racial minority or, except in roles where great physical strength is required, by only recruiting women. The second sentence is more of a problem. If it means that the RAF is determined to reflect society in terms of identity representation, that could indeed be a problem as it requires all demographics in society to have the same degree of wish to join the RAF. This is unlikely to be the case as interests vary greatly statistically by both sex and by background culture.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the head of the armed forces, is reported by Haynes as having said “ [Improving their diversity statistics"] was not "about wokefulness. It is about woefulness. The woefulness of too few women. The woefulness of not reflecting the ethnic, religious and cognitive diversity of our nation." This might be woeful or it might not. It is not clear that any serious survey has been done into why fewer British women and Britons of racial minority are joining the armed forces. This matters quite significantly.

The RAF is reported to be aiming to increase its representation of women to from 20% to 40% and of ethnic minorities from 10% to 20%. This aim is almost based on a wish to ensure that nobody is excluded because of their sex, race or ethnicity which is laudable, but is it based on reality? While the RAF may wish to have 40% of women and Admiral Sir Tony believe that there are ‘too few women’ in the military, is there any evidence that women themselves share this wish? We do not know as it does not seem that they have been surveyed on the matter. There is, however, already significant evidence that men and women’s interests differ on average and in ways that may well make it likely that most of the people who have a wish to join the military will be men. Much of the wish to bring more women into careers like the military, engineering or tech seems to be rooted in the current dominance of “blank slatism” which holds that men and women are psychologically identical and are socially conditioned into certain gender roles. This assumption most often focuses on women who, it is assumed, would make the same career choices in the same numbers as men if only we weren’t conditioned into thinking we actually wanted to do something else. This assumption can be infuriating for women who are pretty sure we do actually want to be doing what we have chosen to do and that the female-dominated professions like healthcare, education, psychology and publishing are also quite important.

Of course, everybody has a responsibility to society and, if there were a general feeling among men that women are not pulling their weight in the military defence of the country, more of us might feel an ethical obligation to set aside whatever it is we prefer to do and take on a military career. It is not clear that this is a feeling commonly held by men, however. If it were, I suspect we’d hear a lot more about it. I would be interested to read a more detailed argument from the admiral Sir Tony for why more women should take up military careers. I expect that his concern is that more women genuinely want to join the military but are being discouraged or prevented in some way and his intentions are purely to remove those barriers in the service of egalitarianism. If so, I think he is well-intentioned but probably mistaken and is possibly overestimating the number of women who want to join the military because his career has brought him into contact with so many who do and have.

The aim to bring more Britons of racial or ethnic minority into the RAF is more realistic. Blank slatism does not apply here as there is no evidence that race affects one’s interests in the same way that sex does. Aiming for 20% of Britons of racial minority in the RAF might be a little high as only 15% of Brits are of racial minority. However, while skin colour does not affect interests, culture does, and nearly 30% of graduating engineers are black or of other ethnic minority as are 19% of people in tech are and around 45% of medical professionals. Therefore, there is an overrepresentation of people of ethnic and racial minority in these professions which seems likely to be due to these professions being held in higher esteem by a greater number of cultural backgrounds that are not white that ones that are. All of these professions are needed by the RAF and it seems quite possible to achieve the overrepresentation it seeks and also worth investigating why there isn’t already one.

However, seeking to fulfil identity-based quotas of RAF personnel is troubling and not simply because employing people based on their immutable characteristics is discriminatory. It is a good thing to measure and record that certain groups are underrepresented and investigate why this might be, but this does not seem to be what is happening. The RAF appears to be trying to fix imbalances from the top rather than undertaking any investigation of why there are imbalances in the first place. If there is a social cause for some or all of these imbalance, it will be essential to discover what it is to redress it. I would suggest that rather than setting percentage quotas which somewhat map on to the demographic of society and trying to meet them, the RAF would do better to commission surveys to determine what representation of which groups there would be if there were no barriers in the way. Find out what percentage of women compared to men regard a career in the military as something they might be interested in and ask them why or why not. Discover what percentages of people from various racial or ethnic minorities see this as appealing and ask them why or why not. Ask people in the professions that are needed by the RAF whether practicing them in the RAF is more or less appealing than practicing them elsewhere and why. Ask people from groups underrepresented in the military if anything is discouraging or preventing them from joining it or if they simply don’t want to.

I realise that this would take a lot more work and money than simply trying to even up imbalances from the top end but it would be worthwhile as it would produce data that would reveal if any of the imbalances are caused by social barriers and what those barriers are which would enable removing them. It would also provide a realistic percentage to work towards based on what people from different demographics actually want to do with their lives rather than one based on an assumption that all groups choose the same things in the same number regardless or sex-based or cultural-based interests and preferences.