Royal Australian Navy sailors participating in the Empowering Excellence Defence Breakfast held at the Heritage Centre, Garden Island (Danyellah Hill/Defence Imagery)

The security gap Australia can’t afford to ignore

The difference between how men and women judge expertise in national security isn’t about knowledge but perceived authority.

Bec Strating,Elise Stephenson

23 March 20264 min read

The ANU National Security College has released findings from a major national survey of more than 18,000 Australians on attitudes to national security. Among its most striking insights is a persistent and revealing gender gap – not only in how Australians understand security, but in who feels entitled to speak about it.

Some of the findings align with familiar patterns. Men are more likely to frame national security in conventional terms: war, terrorism, intelligence agencies, and geopolitical competition. Women, while also concerned about these issues, are more likely to expand the frame by incorporating climate change, social cohesion, and community wellbeing. Women are also more inclined to interpret security through local and lived experiences rather than abstract geopolitical lenses.

But the report’s most novel contributions on gender lie elsewhere. It is not simply that men and women see security differently. It is that women, despite often demonstrating deeper and more grounded understandings of security challenges, are far less likely to view themselves as knowledgeable or authoritative on the topic.

The survey reveals a stark 23-point gap in self-reported knowledge: 46% of men say they understand national security issues, compared to just 23% of women.

When women spoke about national security, they often demonstrated sophisticated analysis, connecting global risks to their families, communities and everyday life. They drew links between social cohesion, economic insecurity, environmental stress and broader stability. In contrast, men tended to adopt more abstract and strategic framings, sometimes coupled with an admission that they may overstate their own confidence.

This gender gap is not one of competence – it is one of perceived authority.

Even as they articulated more comprehensive accounts of security, women underestimated their own understanding. This points to a deeper structural issue: the way “national security” is defined, communicated and performed in public discourse continues to signal that it is not a domain where women naturally belong.

If national security continues to be defined narrowly, it will exclude precisely the kinds of insights needed to address emerging threats.

This matters because who feels authorised to speak shapes which perspectives are heard, and which are sidelined. National security, as a term and practice, can carry exclusionary connotations, privileging certain voices and forms of expertise over others. The result is a narrowing of the policy conversation at precisely the moment when Australia faces an increasingly complex security environment.

These findings have direct implications for Australia’s security capacity. Calls for greater “self-reliance” and increased defence investment in Australia are growing louder in an era of global uncertainty. Meeting these challenges will require not just more resources, but a broader and more diverse national security workforce.

Yet Australia is already facing significant workforce shortfalls across defence and security sectors. In the Australian Defence Force, women remain underrepresented, comprising just 20.7% of the workforce. This figure has barely shifted in recent years. In leadership positions (i.e., those who get to make decisions), the figures are worse – women remain at around 18.5% of senior officers in the ADF.

Efforts to improve recruitment and retention have largely focused on workplace conditions. But the survey suggests the problem is much broader: rooted in wider societal perceptions about who belongs in national security. If women do not see their knowledge and perspectives as relevant to security, they may be less likely to pursue careers in the field in the first place. This is particularly acute in defence, where enduring assumptions about gender and combat continue to shape recruitment and retention.

At the same time, these challenges are unfolding against a backdrop of growing global backlash against gender equality initiatives. The United Nations has warned of the “escalating backlash” against women’s rights and gender equality, contributing to stagnation and regression in the global women, peace and security agenda.

The risk of such backlash is not only that gender inclusion stalls, but that it is actively reversed, narrowing the range of perspectives brought to bear on national security challenges and restricting the potential workforce from which defence can recruit.

The NSC survey finds that the issues women identify as most likely and most catastrophic are also those where Australia is least well prepared. These include domains such as climate change and social fragmentation, which do not always fit neatly within traditional security frameworks. They are also areas where women are least likely to be seen as credible or authoritative voices.

If national security continues to be defined narrowly, it will exclude precisely the kinds of insights needed to address emerging threats. The report makes clear that broadening consultation, diversifying voices, and reframing security to include non-traditional concerns are essential steps.

The challenge, then, is not just to bring more women into existing structures, but to rethink the structures themselves, including how authority is constructed, whose knowledge counts and what “security” is understood to mean.

Until that happens, Australia risks overlooking one of its most underutilised national security assets: the perspectives, expertise, and lived experience of half its population.

This article is part of an existing research project on gender and national security in Australia led by Maria Rost Rublee, Sarah Percy, Danielle Chubb and the authors.

About the authors

Bec Strating

Bec Strating is the Director of the La Trobe Centre for Global Security and Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University.

Elise Stephenson

Elise Stephenson is a youth social entrepreneur and PhD Candidate from the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane.

Topics

Defence & security Gender & equality