Reflections on Education, Gender, and Power in the Defence and Security Sector

With almost 30 years of experience as both an academic and a practitioner, I find working in the Defence and Security sector as fascinating, compelling, and occasionally as frustrating as ever. I’ve always believed in education as a pathway, not only to learning, but as a way to understand different perspectives, and my PhD research into female veteran transition out of the military did just that, challenging my understanding of military culture and my RAF career.
Reflecting on my career during my PhD, I remembered literally being patted on the head by a senior officer, and to combat such patronizing behaviours, I found myself becoming more forceful and occasionally aggressive. Of course, it's easy to take things too far when you are young (one memorable annual report suggested I needed to take some diplomacy classes), but as I gained experience, I learned how to temper my behaviour and took (I hope) a more confident approach. These were hard lessons to learn because it took me many years to understand that although the rank and command structure exists explicitly within the British military, it, like all organisations, functions with hierarchies within hierarchies, and the power and influence of these sub-elements are often implicitly felt but harder to identify.
These relations exist in organisations in what Acker (1992, p. 567) calls “processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of power”, and can result in behaviours where more junior members find themselves patted on the head or worse. Often there is no malicious intent behind these actions (often there is), and in my case I believe the Wing Commander was trying to be kind, but they reflect a pervasively masculine culture that is both at times highly destructive and harmful, and yet arguably at the right time and in the right place also an unavoidable requirement of military life.

It is this paradox that I continue to find fascinating, and now at Cranfield University my work and research have taken on a more international perspective as I deliver defence engagement through professional military education overseas in partnership with the MoD. I continue to work in a masculine environment and, whether with academic or military colleagues, I often find myself sharing a stage or the conference hall with people whose stories have the power to take my breath away. I find myself humbled, and grateful that I didn’t have to face the same choices as they did or still do. My personal experience, educational practice and research with veterans (see the Military Afterlives project and an upcoming paper on my PhD research) come in useful at difficult moments as I draw these threads together to offer understanding or a different perspective, challenging behavioural and, when appropriate, cultural norms. We teach to a largely male audience, and I love the moment a student or delegate sees the world through a different lens or seeks advice as to how they can support change.

I feel extremely privileged to work in the defence and security sector in this way, and recognise we learn as much from our students and delegates as they do from us.