What Is the Male Equivalent? Culture, Standards and Why Long Hair is a Good Thing.

 

Defence is a world that is both simultaneously ever changing, and also stuck fast in a morass of tradition. Those who work in the armed forces are expected to both adapt constantly to new ways of doing their core business, while also having to adhere to standards or rules that seem to have gone unchanged or challenged in decades.

At the same time it is in a constant battle for talent, trying to maintain relevance to the next generation of skilled recruits and then try to keep them for as long as possible. To do this, it draws upon the very best that the UK, and some Commonwealth nations, have to offer and tries to give them a career.

It is against this backdrop that Humphrey wants to consider three separate challenges – that of belonging, of appearance and that of dress styles to try and highlight where issues exist, and where issues may be imagined.

The initial basis for this was the Mail article which featured a Royal Navy Senior Rating from the West Indies stating that Commonwealth recruits felt embarrassed and demoralised as a result of being ‘banned’ from entering certain compartments onboard Royal Navy warships. The suggestion was that the RN was not fully committed to equality and diversity at sea, by not permitting non UK nationals into certain spaces.

Not a top knot in sight - yet... -Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

To be clear, the Rating in question was speaking on the record to the press at an RN organised event – there is no suggestion that any rules have been broken by his making these comments. But are these comments fair or accurate?

All RN ships contain different areas where access is restricted. This could be for safety reasons, or it could be for operational reasons. For example some parts of the ship may contain extremely sensitive material – maybe cryptographic material or particularly classified information. Access to this material is strictly controlled and limited to people with both the right level of security clearance, and also an appropriate ‘need to know’ the information in question.

This means that there will be plenty of spaces on a ship where people cannot come and go as they please. Their access will be controlled, and they will need to have an extremely good professional reason to enter the compartment. The access is usually, but not always linked to the role the person fills – so for example the communications office team will be some of the only people permitted in their office, but they will not be permitted into the ships intelligence office.

These roles are often restricted by nationality, and may have caveats around the handling of information – for example it is possible see the description ‘UK EYES ONLY’ on material that only UK nationals are permitted access to. There are plenty of other caveats too which allow more than one nation to see material – for example UK SECRET REL NATO means the material is a UK Secret document, but it is releasable to NATO nations.

Another example is the so-called ‘compartment’ which is the way where some information needs to be controlled and the number of cleared people able to see it strictly limited. This means that there is a series of CODEWORD documents – such as ‘TOP SECRET ATOMIC’ which means a document is not only TOP SECRET, but can only be shared and shown to people who are members of the ATOMIC compartment. (For anyone interested in understanding the huge raft of challenges about government security classifications, this LINK is essential reading).

When brought together this means that only a very small number of people on any ship will have the ability to see the big picture and understand what is going on and why. For example on a ballistic missile submarine, a tiny number of the ships company will actually know the ships precise position on the navigation chart at any one time, due to the enormous sensitivity around the location of the SSBN patrol area.

Because of the nationality restrictions though, this does mean that many of the more sensitive posts are restricted to UK nationals. This is an inevitable reality of operating with sensitive information and is no different to how other nations militaries work, in having clear restrictions on who can, and cannot, see information.

What this means in practise though is that if you recruit from Commonwealth nations, these people will not be able to fill many of the more sensitive roles permitting access into certain parts of the ship – that’s not about racism or saying they aren’t welcome, its just a reality that not everyone has the same need to know onboard.

While this seems a perfectly reasonable statement to make though, there is perhaps a good question to be asked about how this is communicated internally. That an experienced senior rating felt the need to state the perception and how it made people feel suggests that not everyone in this position appreciates what is being asked of them.

Maybe the better question to ask here is ‘how can it be properly trained into people that the reason they cannot go somewhere onboard is because they don’t have a professional need to know’ and not because of reasons of active discrimination against non-British sailors.

A simple explanation that no one other than a select handful of people onboard (usually the CO and one or two others) has an ‘access all areas’ permission slip may be helpful in stopping negative perceptions. The risk is that things that many internally take for granted may not make much sense to newcomers and should be trained in at some point?

This sense of changing to reflect the times is borne out more widely in news that the RAF is to adapt its hair policy to permit different hair styles – possible including pony tails for men or the dreaded ‘man bun’.

This news has caused an outbreak of hysteria on social media, with people berating the collapse in values and standards and hysterically going on about how the fact that people may be able to have different hair styles is apparently a bad thing.

One has to ask though – why does it matter what style of hair someone has in the armed forces?

We assume that because for the last 100-150 years most military personnel had short hair, that this somehow is the only acceptable standard. Ask an Army Officer if the time has come to permit beards, and you’ll often get a strongly negative response, and comments about standards – yet back in the Crimean War, plenty of soldiers had beards, seemingly without any ill effect.

The phrase ‘standards’ seems to get dragged out a lot at times like this. The problem is that no one ever seems quite able to define what the standards are, or why permitting a change to the regulations means diluting them is inevitable.

Why is a persons ability to be an aircraft engineer or warfare officer or pilot impacted by their choice of lifestyle? In what way is an NCO less able to lead the men and women around them if they have a pony tail? What is the standard and why is the only acceptable standard to be short haired? Why is a moustache perfectly acceptable male grooming in the British Army, but utterly unacceptable in the Royal Navy? Why would soldiering standards fall in the Army if a Private could grow a beard?

These are genuine questions that Humphrey has here – what is the standard and why does hair matter? It seems a lazy answer to hide behind, as if there is somehow either a fear of change, or a fear that you let one thing go, then the whole edifice collapses around you.

If we are so worried that the style of a male officers hair is such that their troops will not be persuaded to follow them into battle, or refuse to carry out orders, perhaps we should ask the deeper question about why our training system is so weak that it relies on the assumption  that only the presence of short hair can keep the troops under control and that any change threatens the stability of the Army.

If the British Army cannot cope with the presence of beards without worrying about a loss of standards, then does that not speak to an inability of its leadership and NCO cadre to lead through what is a fairly simple change – if they can’t handle this change, then why should we have any confidence in their ability to do more complex things that really do matter?

The problem here is that we’ve created an institution that idolises a very fixed view of life and what we judge standards to be – namely the only acceptable look is to be a terribly polite, short haired individual who wears a suit (or ‘female equivalent’) and that any deviation to this is unacceptable.

That’s fine if your recruiting base is a homogenous blob of people who have the same outlook on life and standards as you do. But what happens when you want to recruit and retain people whose views are different? Many people today grow their hair all manner of ways, and can happily move around the workforce without any issue whatsoever.

If you were interested in the armed forces but realised that to fit in, you’d need to lose your hair style, or adhere to hair restrictions that didn’t suit you, why would you join? Why go to an organisation that demands such control over your most basic of life choices?

No doubt people will be saying ‘well if they don’t like it then don’t join’ – and they’re right, these people won’t join. That’s not a good thing- the military is understrength, its struggling to retain people and its struggling to recruit people with the right skills for the future.

The next generation of recruits are those born this century who’ve never known a world without the internet. They’ve grown up digitally connected and they’re going to question why they can’t do something that seems perfectly normal to them. If you want to recruit them and their skills, you need to be able to appeal to them.

What is more important here – is it the maintenance of these mythical standards that everyone cites, yet is unable to offer evidence why it matters, or is it tapping into the next generation of talent and making it as easy as possible for them to want to think about joining? Why push people away for the sake of their hair?

Its also important to realise that we as a society are changing – the dress standards and hair regulations are brilliant if you are a white male. But society is not exclusively white males (thank god) and times have changed.

Are the hair regulations actually damaging the ability to recruit and retain people identifying as BAME? Humphrey understands that some BAME women find it extremely difficult to tie their hair in to the regulation buns required by the Armed Forces due to the nature of their hair (frizzy was the word used – please, if this phrase is wrong, let him know so it can be corrected!).

Why in 21^st Century Britain do the armed forces persist in having a hair standard that actively discriminates against people with different hair to a white male? Its nonsensical and its something that could be fixed very easily and make a genuine quality of life difference with absolutely zero impact on the operational output of the armed forces.

This is the sort of change that the RAF is looking to do (and hopefully the RN and Army will follow suit) – adopt a much more relaxed attitude to hair and grooming that will make life easier for those serving and be a small way of helping recruit and retain.

Hopefully another small thing that will be examined too is the thorny issue of dress codes and making people feel part of a whole force. There was an excellent ‘ladybird book’ doing the rounds this week that included the superb image talking about how a male and female officer going to an away day, and the phrase business casual / female equivalent.

Humphrey shared it online and got a very strong response back from many women who were frustrated at this bloody awful phrase. How is it the case that 30 years after women first went to sea, the Royal Navy is unable to use the phrase ‘business dress’ or to define what ‘female equivalent’ actually means?

One has to wonder if whether when invitations went out saying ‘Ball Dress or Male Equivalent’ to all military social functions or events, how quickly it would be before someone gripped the problem and fixed it. It may sound a small thing, but it’s a lived problem for many women in the armed forces, and it is something that just needs to be fixed

Ultimately for all the talk of how many tanks or guns or ships we have, and whether HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH needs more CIWS, or why the River Class REALLY need Trident missiles fitted to be a proper warship, defence isn’t about the kit. Its about the people who make the kit work. What matters far more than how many tanks we have is how many tank commanders we have, or engineers able to keep ships at sea. Without people, the force is a hollow shell.  

That’s why these little things really do matter – its about standing up and finding ways to fix things that don’t make sense in the 21^st Century – not because you want to ‘dilute standards’ but because you want to keep people in and make their lives more straightforward.

Its about creating a culture where 100% of the workforce feel that they are seen as equals, that they are taken into account and that the traditions, values and standards reflect all of them. We expect them to go into battle and if needs be give their lives to keep us safe-  yet some of us get outraged at the mere though that we could do more to make everyone be treated with an equal level of respect and consideration about their circumstances.

The armed forces need diversity of talent and diversity of thought precisely to challenge group think. If we plan to operate against an exclusively white male middle class (preferably with Officers privately educated) foreign armed force then we’re in luck as that base is pretty covered. If on the other hand we’d like to have a range of different views, experiences and ideas about the best approach to take, we need people from all walks of life to serve – and we need to make it work for all of them equally.

Finally we need to ask why we rely on standards as a crutch to replace the ability to just lead? Leadership is something that is relied on at really difficult times-  some of the most inspirational leaders in military history have been tired, unshaven, wearing filthy clothes and most likely had their shirt pockets undone – yet they managed to inspire other equally tired and slovenly looking people to acts of phenomenal bravery and courage.

A good leader will aim to appear smart, but that doesn’t mean that smart is a cookie cutter stereotype of just one dimensional appearance. Smart could be all manner of things depending on the person in question. What matters far more is their ability to lead, manage and drive a team to succeed.

So, if you feel that you cannot see a way for the Armed Forces to succeed with male officers having a top knot, or longer hair or dreadlocks etc, then perhaps ask yourself ‘why’? Is there any evidence to support this, or are you relying on your gut reaction to the standards changing in a way you don’t recognise?

The military is in a constant battle to evolve and stay relevant – the next Defence Review seems certain to focus on the move to automation, technology and drones as key enablers. But to make it work well needs people to do this – and those people are likely quite different to the military of 10, 50 or 100 years ago.

Perhaps the debate we need to have is ‘what standards actually matter now and what can fall by the wayside to ensure the armed forces remain able to do their job of keeping the nation safe regardless of how they have their hair cut’?