The recent announcement of a class action against the Commonwealth government on behalf of female Australian Defence Force (ADF) members, highlights the way military women are represented to the public. Due to Australia’s opt-out class action system, eligibility of this group currently includes current and former female members of the ADF who have served in the last 22 years, which is potentially more than 38,500 women.
Because of the seriousness of this case, and in the wake of the reversal of gender inclusion policies in the US military, it is likely that the class action will be widely reported in the media. When this occurs, we should be attuned to any portrayal of stereotypes. While Australia has not followed US policy, public opposition to women in the military still exists.
In April this year, a candidate for a NSW federal seat made public comments calling for the removal of women from combat. A group of prominent national security scholars responded to the comments by emphasising that without women in the ADF, critical recruiting targets will fail and that “faux culture wars” distract from strategic readiness. “What’s stopping women from joining our defence force?”, they asked.
Women make up 20.7% of the full-time ADF with a new Defence target of 25% by 2030. The reasons may be fear of discrimination, post-lockdown localism, a resurgence of conservative values, or strategic anxiety. As an all-volunteer force which relies on public support, and more importantly, a sustainable public labour pool, stereotyped media portrayal of women as objectified, damaged or superwomen risks alienating its lifeline.
Sex discrimination is one of the stories about military women, but not all.
Defence has worked hard over the last decade to mitigate the trend in mainstream media reporting which was found to perpetuate a culture of male dominance in the military. Defence News articles, for instance, feature female members and now focus on their roles, qualifications and success. Recent stories about an Air Force refueller, a gender development program in Timor-Leste, and four Navy recipients of Women in Defence Awards, each highlighted their experience, proficiency and technical ability above all else. However, like many professional women, military women keep their eye on the “empowerment paradox” – how they are simultaneously empowered by their career and achievements but disempowered through a lack of appropriate resources and support.
The class action also represents a movement towards contemporary expectations of a fair workplace. However, the problem with fair workplace practice is that it favours everybody – complainant and respondent alike. The risk with media reporting of sex discrimination cases is that the focus is more often on the complainant than the respondent which stigmatises the former. Such a focus may cultivate an assumption in the community that all women will experience sexual assault, harassment and discrimination while they serve in the ADF. It may divert attention from women who have not experienced sex discrimination or have been empowered by their gendered experience of service in the ADF. Media focus on the sex discrimination case should also be attentive to women who have experienced other forms of discrimination due to their race, age, service category, education or socio-economic status. Sex discrimination is one of the stories about military women, but not all.
Broadening the type of reporting on women in the media, however, is likely to come at the expense of other reporting given there is a relative invisibility of the military in Australian society. Since professionalisation of the force in 1973, the ADF has become smaller, highly specialised and contained behind barrack and base walls on the outskirts of capital cities. This physical separation contributes to the civil-military gap, which describes the potential of a cultural separation between a liberal democratic society and its military force in ways that undermine military effectiveness.
Such cultural separation mean that mainstream media reports on military experience are selective and highly curated. The focus tends to represent the ADF as an homogeneous force, however, the ADF has three quite distinct services, seven service categories of employment, and populates more than 70 major bases in Australia. The diversity in the military life is broad and importantly, includes the mundane and the ordinary. The ordinary is not newsworthy but important to a public understanding of the complexity and cultural divergence in a professional all-volunteer force.
The Australian civil-military gap has the potential to erode national security. Female stereotypes in media reporting distort the public’s knowledge of the ADF and incrementally widens that gap. The class action may expose cultural problems in the military, but the media can play an important role in shaping public beliefs and attitudes about military people. The accurate and balanced portrayal of ADF women by all media is more likely to attract the future female military workforce.
