Sea Control - Sea Control 292 — Closing the Gender Gap with Dr. Jeannette Haynie and Brian Kerg

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Links1. "Close the Door on Gender Barriers," by Brian Kerg, Proceedings, United States Naval Institute, August 2021.2. USNI Blog posts by Jeannette Haynie.3. Athena Leadership Project.4. USMC Women’s Initiative Team Facebook page.5. Actionable Change – the FB page is closed to all but female Marines, but there is s also an Allies page.6. "The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles," by Carol Cohn, The New York Times, January 5, 2018

Hey, Voschaert here. John Frerichs is your host today, and he'll be discussing Closing the Gender Gap with Dr. Jeanette Haney and Major Brian Kirk. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. We recently conducted our SimSec Forum for Authors and Readers in conjunction with the Center for Naval Analysis. You should be able to find a link on our main website and see a few of our great contributors presenting their work as well as answering audience questions. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the bilge pumps, you can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kim Brisman.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Guten Tag, shipmates, and welcome back. Today, we will discuss a recent article published by the United States Naval Institute that demands that the gender barrier in the naval service be closed. As our guests today, we have the author Major Brian Kerr, a regular author and contributor to maritime security issues. We are also fortunate to be joined by Jeanette Haney, who has previously worked on gender issues both in the military and out of the military. Both Brian and Jeanette have an extensive list of published pieces, and I really look forward to seeing where the conversation goes. Brian and Jeanette, can you guys both please introduce yourselves and explain your

interest in the topic. Certainly. Thanks so much for having us. I must say up top that I'm honored to be on sea control alongside Dr. Haney. So who am I? Yes, I am a Marine Corps officer. A long time ago, I was an enlisted mortarman, and after commissioning was designated as a communications officer. I felt a typical mix and match of operational and supporting establishment billets, deployed aboard ship with the MEU, Marine Expeditionary Unit, and ashore to Afghanistan. And I'm currently a student at the School of Advanced Warfighting, learning to become an operational planner. Outside of that, I'm also a non-resident fellow with the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, recently completed a stint as a military fellow with

the College of William and Mary's Project for International Peace and Security. I'm also an adjunct faculty member at Marine Corps University's Continuing Education Program, and I do a lot of independent research and writing on topics pertaining to maritime security issues. And I'm Jeanette Haney, obviously, and I am, like Brian, very excited to be on today and honored to be included in this discussion. I am a retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel and Cobra pilot by trade, but I fly a Honda Odyssey right now, so nothing exciting. But I, as a woman in the Marine Corps, had a set of experiences on active duty that I wanted to understand better, so I went back to school and earned my PhD in international relations some years ago at GWU in D.C. And the

focus of my research, both before, during, and since has really been the gender dimensions of violence and conflict. And I've spent a lot of time studying the issue of gender in the military from all sorts of perspectives. I've done some writing and research on it since about 2009 and forward. And I have three children and I'm married to a, about to retire Marine Corps infantry officer. I am currently at the Rand Corporation. I also run a small nonprofit called the Athena a leadership project. And I teach as an adjunct at George Washington University. I teach a class on gender and conflict. So I'm really excited to talk about this today. My interest is personal. And, you know, as you mentioned earlier, everything we're saying today is from our

own personal experiences. We're not representing the institutions that we work with, but just really excited to be here. So thank you. Great. Thank you both. And the article we're going to focused on today is titled Close the Door on Gender Barriers. It was published in the August 2021 publication of Proceedings by USNI. While I was reading the article, I appreciated Brian's honesty and self-reflection in addition to his practical proposals on how the Naval Service can help close the gender gap. Having read some of Jeanette's writing on similar topics, I felt she could provide a complementary but alternative perspective. Before we begin, as Jeanette mentioned, I'll remind the listeners that all opinions express our own and not reflective of

any institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. I'll say up front that this podcast will not be a debate regarding the benefits of gender diversity and the need to close the door on gender barriers. We simply accept that as a fact. I will reinforce this with a quote from the SimSec statement on diversity and inclusion, that diversity and inclusion are the core principles shaping the way we build our teams, work together, and create a global and multicultural forum to foster the discussions on securing the seas. With that, Brian, why did you write the article and what was your inspiration? Yeah, certainly. So I'll apologize up front because I also want to touch on the personal story that I referenced in the article because these things are integrated,

but I'll start with inspiration. So my wife, she served as a Marine, notably as a Marine security guard. And through her, I became keenly aware of many of the biases and obstacles faced only by female Marines I would have otherwise been blind to. She can be very forthcoming with her experience and has shared some of those with me. And that's helped shape my own interest in learning more about this issue. I'm a parent and my eldest child is my daughter. Should she choose to serve, I never want her to have to face the same biases or at least to reduce or eliminate as many of them as I can. I've been led by, served alongside, and led female Marines throughout my career. I hope to keep with faith with them by bringing some of these challenges to light in a

unique way and use my writing to propose some of those solutions. That's why I wrote this specific subject. A part of it involves how the discussion on the general topic of gender integration has taking place within military circles, whether this is professional journals like the Naval Institute's Proceedings, the Rinkle Gazette, message boards, social media, anywhere else. The subject can be emotional. It can be controversial. Participants can often talk past each other, and often participants will completely misconstrue a position or conflate one issue with another. And in this mix, we tend to see a misperception of extremes. So those who take a position advocating for full and complete gender integration are often accused

of trying to lower physical standards to allow more women to serve in general, and specifically for more women to serve in positions that were previously closed to them, such as combat arms and special forces. The implication and assumptions behind those is that this will somehow make the service less lethal and less capable of fighting or winning wars. Meanwhile, those who take position of not changing or lowering physical standards are often accused of misogyny and trying to keep more women from serving in general, and specifically of trying to keep women from serving in those positions that were formerly close to them. So in turn, the issue of physical standards becomes a proxy for standards in general, which becomes a proxy for fairness and a meritocracy in our

promotion, selection, and assignment processes. And while these issues are all related, they're not one and the same. And in the article, I wanted to attempt to untangle them, articulate them in a clearer light so that the actual obstacles to fairness, meritocracy, and integration can be identified and hopefully overcome. I also felt that commentary like this from a mid-grade leader might be more resonant with the ponderance of the force, just from a level of relatability. And finally, I'll touch on that personal story regarding my time as a Marine officer instructor MOI that I mentioned in the article, and that really, you know, kind of was a catalyst for me as far as realizing where I needed to improve my own perspective. So the MOI is the Marine

officer instructor, that's the Marine faculty member of a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps unit. And for international listeners, that's undergraduates at a civilian university who aspire to become naval officers through this unique program. Mentoring and officer development are essential roles filled by the naval ROTC staff. The mids or the midshipmen, they were free to pop into the office whenever to discuss issues of concern to them. Often these can be very personal problems, and if you expect to speak freely about something, you expect a level of privacy. My office was right by a main hallway, and people would walk by all the time. So here I am, the new marine officer instructor, super pumped to be in this critical role where I'll get to have an impact

on future officers every day for one, two, maybe even three years shaping these future leaders, depending on their year group. And a mail midshipman, he pops in and he's seeking help for a personal issue. He closes the door, as you'd expect. We have a long, frank discussion. He gains a better understanding of how to proceed with the challenge he's facing. He's relieved that things aren't as stark as he thought. He knows he's got reinforcing fireworks for me if he needs, and he departs. And he knows he can trust me. He's set up for success, and down the road, he commissions, no problem. Later that week, a female midshipman, she pops in. She asks if we can talk. I say, sure. She starts to close the door, and instinctively,

without even thinking about it, I ask her to keep the door open. She, of course, opens the door. We have our conversation, and the subject was not nearly as serious as I thought it would be for an office call, and the way she spoke, she came across as though she were thinking of something else to say, and we've all seen what this looks like. You know, someone's reaching for, creating new thoughts on the fly. In a sense, it's like somebody trying to make up something in the moment. And of course, she was making something else up to sidestep the awkwardness I just created for her, and that she wasn't in a position to talk about what she originally intended to, probably because it would have been inappropriate to do so with an open door, with all the world

walking by to hear. So she leaves, and later down the road, she commissions no problem. So whatever she needed help with or needed to figure out, she figured it out another way, not because of any support or guidance I could have offered. And immediately, I realized that I'd screwed up. And by doing what I'd been taught to do my whole career, whether in a barracks, on a ship, you name the environment, by keeping that door open, because we were of a mixed gender, that I'd immediately and clearly communicated to that future officer that she and I were not going to have the same level of trust that her male peers and I enjoyed. And that was a moment of clarity for me. So naturally, I thought about why that habit was ingrained in me. It not only was

ingrained due to policies like those that exist for barracks and aboard ship, i.e., when I was on a ship, the hatch could be shut in a male stateroom if a female had entered and vice versa. In the barracks, if it was a male room and a female entered, the door had to remain open at 90 degrees and vice versa. But also because my whole career, at certain moments in my development, I had leaders tell me to be careful about creating a perception of impropriety, that being alone with a female service member, especially a subordinate, would get people talking, and that since perception is reality, it was one and the same, that to be alone with a subordinate, even in an official workspace, was the same as having an inappropriate relationship with that subordinate. I recall

when I was much younger, my captain explaining to me if we, and this was an all-male audience, find you, found ourselves having to work late, which we would. And if our counterparts, say our XO, if we were the CO, our staff in COIC, or staff non-commissioned officer in charge, if we were a platoon commander, was female, that we should avoid being alone with them and push the project until, say, the next day. So we could work on it when everyone else was around. We've heard versions of that message. Don't be alone with your coworker if they are not your gender, because perception is reality throughout our careers. And this phenomenon has been studied at length and is evident across industries, it is absolutely harmful to women in any profession, especially the military,

and as a force, only reduces our likelihood of retaining those women for the long term and giving us a smaller pool of talent from which to select the right people for the right jobs. And so that's a long answer to your short question, but that's why I review it. Thank you, Brian. And again, a sincere appreciation for kind of your honesty and transparency with your experiences there. Jeanette, for you, you've been writing about gender-related issues in the military for at least the last nine years, since you published an article in the Proceedings back in 2012. Two-part question for you. One, any response to Brian's statement and his experiences, and did you experience the same? And then,

do you believe that the Naval Service has made any progress in the last nine years? Thank you. And Brian, thank you for that story. And it's funny, as you were talking, I had kind of sketched out where I thought I would answer based on the questions we talked about ahead of time. And I, I changed mine a little bit, just hearing your story firsthand, instead of reading it, because it reminded me of how often that happened to me. I'm going to date myself a little bit here. But you know, starting back as a midshipman in the mid 90s, at Navy and, and for a long time, I don't think I understood that that was what was happening when I would walk into senior leaders offices, because I didn't have experiences as a male, you know, to compare them

to. But I'm going to back up a little bit here. So in 2003, or four, when I was still flying Cobras on active duty in my first fleet squadron, we got a new XO in and I was always everywhere I went, I was the only female pilot. So kind of had to, to figure my way out through that. And I had a really great peer group, which helped, but this XO, uh, brought me in for his initial meet and greet. And I sat down and he said, he was really excited to have a female officer in this squadron for the first time, because then when junior enlisted women had problems, they could refer those problems and the women directly to me. And I remember looking at him and I was what, I don't know, 26 or something at the time. And I said, and I'll refer them directly to their staff

NCOIC, sir? And it's an interesting question I've thought about since then over and over again. I, as a woman in the Marine Corps at the time, especially in the, in the skid community did not want to be associated with my gender. I was a Marine, I was a Cobra pilot, just like everybody else. And I sought every means possible to make sure that was a very clear message sent by my behavior, by the way, I acted and dressed and talked, et cetera. So I did not want to be singled out and, um, be, you know, like the mom in charge is how I heard it referred to a number of times. Um, but at the same time in the Marine Corps of 2003 and 2004, we probably needed someone to do that for those junior women because they were just in, in so much, uh, in such vulnerable

positions, uh, relative to their peers, relative to me, et cetera. So it's been an interesting kind of bifurcation or a different way of thinking about that specific question over time, whether, whether my answer was right or wrong. It was probably right in an ideal Marine Corps, which did not exist then and does not exist now and may never exist. But it was also probably wrong. So all to say, you know, I, I really started thinking and writing about this in earnest in 2009, 2010. And the initial response I got often through USNI, which is my first platform, through commenters there, which I was asked to engage with, or who I was asked to engage with, was that I was trying to turn the military into a social experiment.

And y'all have both probably heard this before. And I didn't agree with that because the U.S. is a social experiment. The United States is. Everything we do is about who we are as a country and how we're, you know, what our norms are, what our values are. So they're constantly growing and refining and there's some shifting going on. And I really feel deeply that the military needs to reflect who this country is. Um, and my experience kind of supported that. So back in 2009, 10 through 2012, um, it was

definitely an uphill battle to get these issues discussed and get them, get them recognized as being serious, legitimate issues. Fast forward now a decade plus, have we come far enough or have it, has it, has it changed? Yes, it has changed more than I expected it to, I think in some ways, but also not in some ways. We attack the symptoms in many ways instead of attacking the root problems. And I'll back up a little bit on that as well. We talk about things like parental leave policies. These are important. We talk about hair standards, very important, PFT, important things to consider. But what we're really not talking about is understanding why. What does increasing the diversity and the inclusive nature of the force give us as a Marine

Corps, as a DOD? What does that do to us as an organization and how does it help us think and act and make decisions? And if you look at the conflicts of the past two decades, it to me shows that women and diverse service members across the board are needed, one, on a tactical level, because different skills are needed in different situations. And, you know, people like to throw out in the context of the women, peace and security field, things like women searching women in the marketplace and, you know, examples like that. So there are tactical needs. There are also needs from a numbers perspective, because if you recruit 90% of the population of an institution from one very small and shrinking group of individuals in the broader U.S. population,

you're just not going to get every skill you needed, and you're definitely not going to be getting all of the best all the time. So from a numbers perspective, it's needed. But more than that, we really, as an institution, need to understand the value of diverse perspectives in something as complex as conflict and what those different diverse perspectives actually bring to conflict decision-making. And that's really where my passions lie, is understanding what perspectives different people can bring based on their past experiences and how that determines what they see in conflict. And I'm happy to kind of dork out on those examples later down the road in the conversation or provide some references that people want to look up and learn

some more. I'll say one, two other quick things. Um, one is that brief story in 2007, uh, I had been in for about nine years on active duty and I had planned to stay in and make a career out of it. And, uh, I had, uh, a child, my husband and I had a baby in 2005 and he instantly, you know, well, instantly six weeks later, when she was six weeks old, he left for Iraq for a company command tour. And I was, went back to work the week he left, um, with a six week old and I was flying and I was a night systems instructor in the Cobra. So it was flying some bizarre hours and he was gone for seven months, came back, shopped to the, to the Mew and then did workups with the Mew and then left again. And he was gone of the first two and a half years of her life.

he was gone most of those, most of two years. Um, and I was so low parenting back in Camp Pendleton, trying to desperately trying to keep my career going and trying to fly and be everything that we are, you know, taught an officer in the Marine Corps should be. Um, and I felt like I was failing on every single level. And I can remember one clear day driving to work that morning. Um, hadn't been able to talk to him in over a month because of where they were in Iraq and, uh, um, the current tempo of operations there. And I knew without a doubt that that day, if I didn't put the brakes on, I was either going to crash my car with my daughter in the backseat or crash the Cobra with a student in the front seat. So I went in and I dropped my papers. I resigned my activity

commission and I ended up switching to the reserves. But that afternoon I ran into a former commanding officer of mine and he asked why I was upset. And I told him, and mind you, my daughter was two at this time. And he said, well, you know, Jeanette, we always knew this would happen. As soon as you had a baby, the writing was on the wall. It's the right thing to do. It's the natural thing to do. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but the writing on the wall phrase stuck with me because I felt abandoned and betrayed. And all of a sudden, all of the ways in which the institution had not worked for me from the moment of her birth on, where no matter how hard I worked, no matter how hard I tried, I felt I was failing. No one reached out. No one checked on me to see

how I was doing with a husband in Iraq and a newborn baby at home and flying nights. No one ever asked if I needed help when the daycares were all shut down and there was a one-year wait for CDC on base or when I ripped ab muscles trying to do a PFT and pass it while solo parenting. And that statement, the writing on the wall statement made me so, so curious about what it was that was set up within the Marine Corps as far as policy and, and career framework and everything else that had shaped, had shaped my career at that point. So the last thing I'll say on that is instead of tackling only the symptoms, which is the policy changes and things like that, we really, as an institution need to think about what it says when we set male as the

standard and female is the other and expect everything to follow. And I'll stop talking there. Jeanette, thank you. And that's a perfect transition back over to Brian. Brian, one of the things I really appreciated about your article was that you did offer some tangible opportunities to help close the gender barriers. And we'll be interested to get Jeanette's feedback or perspective of those, but specifically they were enabling absent mentors, changing divergent standards and recognizing blind spots. Can you give a brief overview of each element and why you chose to focus on those? Absolutely. First, I just have to say that Jeanette's story was incredibly powerful and just accords with some of the things we'll discuss as far as a lack of

awareness among leaders, especially male leaders, for those challenges that are unique to women, in particular their subordinates, as well as the underlying assumptions about the choice between career and family and who has to bear the brunt of that cost when a when a family makes a decision as far as how to proceed to achieve balance may not even be the right word, but it's just to make some stark choices. So so going into answering your question. So let's start with the mentors in the professional world. Men comprise the majority of leaders and managers, but most of these male leaders avoid mentoring female supportants. In my article, I study cited a study in which 60% of male managers surveyed were uncomfortable mentoring, socializing with,

or conducting one-on-one work-related activities with women. The most common reason they cited was a fear of creating perceptions of impropriety that could have repercussions for their careers. The cost of this avoidance, that only grows across one's career because mentors serve as influential members in one's network that advocate for the career of their protégés. They write letters of recommendation. They sit on selection boards. They talk to other decision makers involved in promotion and selection decisions, especially the Marine Corps may seem big, but it's quite small. And, you know, reputation travels and people talk and managers will work to get their high performing people selected for key assignments. This happens in informal ways throughout our career. So let's take a Marine Corps example. You're in a regiment. You're overstaffed with captains and an IA, an individual augmentee bill for deployment to, say, Marine Rotational Forces Darwin opens up.

Everyone joined the Marine Corps to deploy and operational experience is career enhancing. So the regiment tags the battalions to identify nominees. The regiment rack and stack. The regimental commander will select the lucky guy or gal to go on that deployment. This is not an objective process, and it's shaped by how well the mentors are willing to go to bat for their nominee. I've done this myself as a company commander when I was advocating for my lieutenants, my captains to get a chance to get in the fight. I had the people that I valued that I thought this would be best for, and I pleaded a very strong case to my boss to make that happen. The strength of that case is going to be shaped by the strength of the mentor-protege relationship. So if you don't have those relationships, you're significantly disadvantaged in that selection process.

And as you progress in your career, there are cascading consequences to this. You didn't deploy during your time as a company grade officer, so you have a lower chance of selection to resident PME as a captain, professional military education as a captain. Being at a disadvantage, you're less likely to get tagged for, say, one of the few company command slots that might be open to you because the boss is already assessing. Oh, this person's not PME complete. That person is. So person B, they've got a greater chance of success down the road. So I'm already going to pick them. That means you're less likely to to go to some of those programs as a major, which means you're on your back heels already for lieutenant colonel. And now you're treading water for selection as a battalion commander. So there's a snowball effect there. Quite simply, we have to kill the idea that men and women cannot be alone in a professional environment and that that mentor-protege relationship shouldn't exist between men and women.

We have to remove the idea that, in this instance at least, perception is reality. And let's just unpack the assumptions behind that perception and the policies created around it. So by saying that men and women can't be alone together, whether in a barracks room or in a room aboard a ship or in an office with a closed door, we are effectively saying that these otherwise professional warfighters who will put you know behind the cockpit of an aircraft that will put behind a weapon system that will put in charge of platoon or a company of warfighters that are going to deploy and do all the things we expect to do that really they're just mindless animals with absolutely no agency and self-determination and will immediately engage in inappropriate intimate activities once the door closes

And I think it's fair to say that that is all absolutely false. And we know it to be false, yet these policies remain. Okay, so changing, pivoting to divergent standards. And this subject will usually generate a lot of acrimony and a lot of that talking past each other that I talked about. It certainly has as we, you know, came to this point of removing prohibitions on women serving in common arms roles. It's no secret that there are different physical fitness standards for men and women. So what does this do? From day one, we take men and women, we put them together to train for a single purpose, but we score them differently on physical fitness standards.

For one's career, especially at more junior levels, this will compute into points that will immediately impact evaluation and fitness reports, giving women more points for less physical performance than their male counterparts. And this can create, here's the crux of my argument on this piece. this creates institutional misogyny by teaching predominantly the 18 to 21 year old at the entry level very malleable young men and women that women can do less and get more and that women need a leg up and this also creates the golem effect of women by teaching them that they cannot perform to the same standard this is very easily remedied through a gender neutral scoring system for a physical fitness test now when when you say that when you throw that out there a gender neutral score. Generally, people will jump to a conclusion. And this doesn't necessarily mean we

take the male standards as they exist and make female standards the same. And that could potentially play into what Jeanette was talking about as far as that differentiation of the male and female and singling people out. Rather, I'm advocating for a single gender neutral standard. Now, in effect, that could mean you take the currently existing male standards and you make those required for all. But that's not necessarily your only choice. And in fact, I would say it's not your only choice. It could also mean, say, lowering the male standards a bit and raising the female standards a bit, so they meet the middle. It could also mean a completely different test. The essential thing, however, is that there is one standard for all. Because if you don't,

you continue to create that misperception. And when I was a recruit at boot camp, that was a point of contention and one that was discussed amongst the male drill instructors to the recruits and informed us in that way. When I was at the School of Infantry, you know, those same misperceptions were embedded in me. When I was at Officer Candidate School, when I was at the basic school, and in various other points throughout my career, even as a company commander not too long ago, when we're conducting our physical fitness tests, the male and female Marines who are otherwise great friends, you know, they're just kind of, you know, joking around with each other and making those differences a point of the joke. And it could even lead to not just,

you know, a female doing fewer pull-ups and getting the same score as a male and a male saying, oh man, must be nice. It could also be that female making a point to going up to 20 to 23 pull-ups and a male who goes after her getting significantly less than that. And then that, that male becomes, you know, emasculated and feminized. And that also carries with it the idea that feminine is less, right? So that's a problem. It's also worth noting that the DOD directive for physical readiness programs, emphasize physical fitness and general health. A lot of the conversation on this issue, though, conflates tests like the physical fitness test or physical readiness test with one's aptitude for certain combat arms MOSs. So the inference

becomes if the fitness test becomes relatively, quote unquote, easier, then we'll set a lower bar for new members to enter combat arms fields, creating a less physically capable or a less lethal force. And that also assumes that lethality equals physical capability exclusively, which is an incorrect assumption. And besides that, we can change our fitness test scores and tests all day as the Marine Corps now has separate and distinct gender-neutral physical aptitude tests that must be completed to enter into fields like infantry. So even if, say, we set the lowest time for our physical fitness test for a three-mile run as 20 minutes to get that max score for all, for men and women. This would not change or impact the separate scores,

the separate already gender neutral scores needed for a male or a female to start training as, say, an infantry officer. So as far as physical readiness test scores, PFT, CFT, PRT, what I'm saying is just one standard for all, regardless of what the test form is, one standard for all can help address some of these issues. And finally, blind spots. And in the stories that we've been sharing, Jeanette and I have been speaking to some of the disparities that exist when these blind spots inform policy or assumptions across an institution. Men and women have different lived experiences. For example, when I decided to go on a run after the sun goes down, I don't think twice about my run route because I'm about a six foot tall, 185 pound man. That's not to say

I'm invincible. I'm certainly not. I just don't really think about anything other than how far am i going to go and do i need to bring water right because i'm not going to see the environment around me or the people in that environment as you know predatory were out to get me if my wife who is significantly smaller and lighter than me wants to go on a run after the sun goes down life and statistics have taught her that she does have to consider a lot more factors to ensure her safety or whether she should even go on a run at all because the people in that environment may have a larger degree of seeing her in a predatory light. And I only know that and attempt to understand that by her sharing her perspective. So how can male leaders rapidly close the gap or

at least start the process of closing the gap in those blind spots? There are some very illuminating reports out there. The annual report on sexual assault in the military and the workplace and gender relations survey of active duty members, among others, will open up your eyes if you just read them. It's so, so easy to think, hey, well, I'm a good guy. I treat everyone with dignity and respect and I don't see anything negative happening. And the people I spend time with, they must naturally also all be good people too, right? So sure, yeah, crime happens, but it's rare and it doesn't happen on my watch. Well, you're like a fish who doesn't realize it's underwater with that perspective. If you are a leader in the military services, you need to read

these reports or you will not be in a position to address the problem. That would be like if You are a planner going straight into course of action development without doing problem framing. You don't understand the problem you're trying to solve, and you will fail. Jeanette, back to you. Are Brian's proposals attacking the symptoms or the root causes? And then where do you agree, and are there elements of recommendations that you disagree with?

Yeah, I think, so obviously I was talking about the root causes earlier. There's a need for both. Um, and I think that we need good people attacking the symptoms with the root causes in mind. Um, so Brian, I really enjoyed the article. Um, and it's funny cause I think Johnny mentioned the, the proceedings article that my husband and I coauthored in 2012, um, obviously also a dual Marine Corps marriage here. And, uh, the growth in our marriage has come from the two of us listening to each other and listening to our stories as well.

And it's been I love hearing about the parallels in other relationships. So that's neither here nor there. But we need people working on both. But we really need we need the recommendations and the policy changes that come from those to fall in line under what the overarching goal is. it? Is it to make the Marine Corps a more inclusive, equitable, diverse force? To me, I think that's the goal we should be reaching for. And so as we look at different policies and we look at recommendations to make to senior leaders, that's the goal I would like to have in the back of my head and from my experience. I will say on the mentorship question, that is one of my favorite recommendations because I have to be honest, I didn't know that mentorship happened in the Marine Corps for probably the first 16 or 17 years of my career. And the first time a Marine, I never worked with any senior female Marines. So they were all men. The first time a

male Marine reached out and mentored me a degree, it kind of really, it surprised me. I didn't know what it was. I was so grateful. I said, thank you like 500 times. And I think I freaked him out. um and it just hadn't dawned on me that this was something that marines did for each other and that you you reach out and you develop others and you help them and it was illuminating and i started to look back and wondered what i'd missed all these years um and so yes the mentorship is a very important recommendation and it's one that can i love storytelling because storytelling can build empathy it can build awareness um and it can shape how you start to think about groups of people about outcomes and about the policies that impact them um on the pft piece it's it's

interesting because i my views on this have shifted and changed a little bit over time i started off um very very much in favor of one standard basically the male standard for everyone and you know, this is what we should strive to make. And it was kind of fed a little bit as well when the Marine Corps started talking about pull-ups and requiring women to do pull-ups. I think it was 2012 or so. And, you know, at the time I was a reservist, I had three kids. I had never really tried pull-ups because I didn't have to do them. I'm a runner. So I'm, you know, kind of tall and thin, but I don't do pull-ups. And at 36, 37 years old, I ended up talking with Misty Posey, who I am forever going to be grateful for. And over the phone and email, she coached me through a pull-up

routine. And within a couple of weeks, I was doing three pull-ups, then four, then five. And I'm never going to be knocking out 20 or 23. I'm in my mid forties now, and I'm good with being able to do a couple, but it taught me a lesson. And that was that expectations matter. And I know, Brian, you've said this as well. So setting standards that we can strive for, that makes us work, and by us, I mean everyone, male, female, in between, et cetera, that we can work for those standards and try to reach them, that's an important step to make. And I will say that in the USNI article that you wrote, Brian, it didn't, the nuance between gender neutral standard or the nuance around gender neutral standards that you discussed really well just now did not

come across as much so i thought you were going to talk to you know the male standard is the one we should aim for and i appreciate very much that you left it open as you know we need to think about we need to think about what those standards are are the male standards general neutral what would a general neutral standard be um and i'm so i'm really glad you went into that because it's I've grown to understand that, one, the Marine Corps messages the difference between the PFT, the CFT, and MOS-specific standards and a Marine's ability to physically accomplish the task needed in his or her MOS. That messaging is done pretty poorly because we do conflate someone's ability to score a certain set of points on the PFT with their ability to be a successful Marine and leader of Marines. Um, so I think that, you know, if you were to ask me today as retired lieutenant colonel, uh, and someone who's taken CFTs and PFTs and tried to do it after having three C-sections, that establishing a set of standards for MOSs that is directly, that the standards that are directly tied to what a Marine will be able to do that are gender neutral is very important. As for the PFT and CFT, I'm not sold on the best way to cut those up. We age norm them and we don't hear a lot of complaints about age norming. But I do think that if we have separate standards for those, we need to do a much far better job messaging why those standards exist the way they are.

I would also advocate for potentially changing it to a pass-fail and establishing something that is tested and works to determine an appropriate, relevant level of baseline fitness for all Marines of all genders, and then making it a pass-fail and making the MOS standards the ones that really matter. um and you know the note about creating institutional misogyny i agree that the way it's currently messaged and set up does feed misogyny and it and it feeds um some of our worst tendencies as an institution to believe others are less than or or or you know differently capable of accomplishing certain tasks but i think that that misogyny is is already there it's part of our society, it is reinforced in some ways by how we consider military service across this country. And, you know, it's not really the time right now to go deeper into the Marine Corps and what we learn about men and women and about each other as we go through initial training. But I think

those elements are already in place. And we read those elements into different things, such as PFT and cft gender norm scores um asa joke that there's no p in jj did tie buckle for pull-ups because you know this is my my last point in the pft piece is that i really believe that we overemphasize um physical strength specifically upper body strength when we consider what it takes to make a good combat leader or a good leader of marines in general um so there's you know there's no p for pull-ups and jd did tie buckle but there should be another e for empathy um and it's not there and then on the uh on the last point about blind spots i i love that one very much i think that having um having a curiosity and i'm gonna paraphrase ted lasso who

was um i'm drawing a blank right now on who he was paraphrasing but the be curious not judgmental piece um be curious if if you know and i i try to live this in my own life and i probably failed nine times out of 10. But understanding a little bit more about the people we lead and the lived realities of their lives and what they experience in the morning before they get to work and what they go home to in the evening and what the years of their lives look like before they cross paths with us can go a long way towards making the Marine Corps and any institution a better, more equitable, more inclusive organization. Because then we can also start to understand the value they bring and what perspectives they can bring to decisions. Okay, I'll stop there as well

because I know we could talk about this for a long time. Brian, back to you. Of your three recommendations, is there one that you believe is more important than the others? Yeah, sure. First off, let me just say, I definitely appreciate those insights on the relationships between the symptoms and the root causes because there's a lot to get after here and it's important to understand, you know, if you, just because you get rid of a symptom doesn't mean the underlying cause has not yet been addressed. And that's an important part of this conversation. And regarding the tests, again, because these fitness tests become such a central part of this discussion and tend to dominate it, as we address it, I think it's important for us to ask ourselves, you know,

what is the purpose of the test? What is it supposed to be measuring? And if physical fitness is so central, especially to the Marine Corps, what does it take to make a good Marine? And what do you, as a leader, what do you want in your Marines? Not that it's a mutually exclusive choice, but, you know, if I have to choose between a Marine who can perfectly score a 300 on their PFT, a 300 in the CFT, has a black belt in the Marine Corps martial arts program, but struggles at their primary job and the reason they fill part of my table of organization, or if I want to choose a Marine who is physically average, and notably a physically average Marine is still significantly fit and meets the standards and does what the Marine Corps asks them to physically,

but just kind of like an okay physical Marine who is a rock star at their primary job. My tendency when I was younger was I want the physical stud because that's what I thought a good Marine was. Having been a company commander and now considering those aspects of command as, you know, I may assume different levels of leadership in the Marine Corps. I want the Marine who's good at his job. So pivoting back to your question, of the three, what do I believe is the most important? I would have to say, if I had to pick one, it's closing those blind spots, building that awareness. Because if you have a real awareness of what our female service members face, that's the first step to effective change. If you can get that under your belt, the rest will

follow. And frankly, the other two are policy-driven and culture-driven that are going to require action at the highest levels or require significant time to percolate and reach critical mass. But reading those reports and closing those blind spots, any leader can download those right now, read the reports, and build that essay today. So I would start there. Jeanette, same question to you. And your response does not have to be limited to three proposals. What would be your recommendation to start driving change? And it's funny because I was kind of circling around these and trying to figure out how to create one that concisely explains, you know, develop a broader vision for the Marine Corps

that can really emphasize changing away from the root causes towards what we, you know, what the Marine Corps could ideally be. But that's very esoteric and, you know, a lot of theory does and it's generational. So I think if you're going to look for one really key recommendation right now, it's similar to what Brian said, education. Teach, figure out how to learn differently, how to learn from others, get curious. And one of, you know, one of the things that I feel benefited me most in my career, and my husband has echoed this as well, is having different experiences that didn't, that didn't match the normal career path, kind of shook us out of our, shook us out of our biases a little bit. Not that we'll ever be free of them. I'm

going to spend the rest of my life trying to untangle my assumptions and biases and help me see things in a more comprehensive way. But we do that in baby steps day after day. And we start with having different conversations and having different experiences. I think on a more specific or granular level for individual leaders listening to this, pursue different ways of education, get a master's in the evening, you know, tackle a couple of big books, have some hard conversations with Marines you've served with who you have been a little bit curious about, you know, what their careers and their lives were like, and also seek mentorship. That's a way of education as well. So it's kind of a catch-all, but it's also a way of tackling those blind spots and

dismantling the assumptions we have. Broadening out, I'd like to ask you both, if you were CNO for a week, what action or actions would you take to help close the gender barriers that we've discussed here today? Sure. So, you know, bulletizing out a lot of what we just discussed. First, require all officers and staff NCOs to read those reports we mentioned, the DOD reports on sexual assault and those gender-specific reports. Two, abolish the requirement for hatches to remain open when professional warfighters of mixed gender are in the same space together. Three, proactively tell the force, message to the force, that this perception that men and women can't be alone together, that we've created over generations,

is no more and will not be tolerated, and that I demand mentorship. Four, create gender-neutral standards for physical readiness tests and message the difference between our physical fitness tests and our job-specific fitness tests. And it wasn't discussed in the article, but it came up in our conversation. Dedicate funding to add hours and capacity to child development centers on base so that daycare availability realistically fits the work days and the demands we place upon our Marines and sailors so they don't have to come to a realization one day that they may very well crash their vehicle or their airframe if the balance can't be better supported. Brian, I appreciate you bringing in the story there.

It always feels a little bit weird when I tell it because it was a very visceral experience. But I, you know, I was thinking about how to answer this question because it's tricky. you know, for someone to come in and say, oh, I could be the CNO for a week, and this is what I do, and it would fix everything. I don't have a bunch of bullets. What I have instead is really top-driven leadership set the course. CNO, others at the top, but, you know, across the ADN services and across the whole of government, where do we want these institutions to be in 10 years? Where do we want them to be in 20 years? Set that course and sail for it. But on a granular level for leaders at every rank, there are people working within each service and within DoD as a

whole towards making the services and making DoD more inclusive and more equitable and more diverse. And I'm going to throw a bunch off the top of my head. I come first back to Action Will Change, which was launched just after the Marines United episode or issue back in 2017. But, but the wit, the women's initiative team, the other services have women's initiative teams too. I think I'm not sure actually if the Navy does the army and the air force do Dacowicz, which when I was younger was to me like a curse word because people would,

you know, the men I would serve with would, would make fun of Dacowicz. And instantly I saw that as my enemy because it, It had to do with women and gender, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Dachowicz has been doing some amazing work trying to set that course and sail to it for years. But talent management, T-MOD, I think they're back under MNRE now, but talent management is a key issue. Understanding the value that different perspectives bring and different experiences and slotting those people into roles where they can really, really make an impact is important, and it needs to be done seriously. um so if you're a leader at different levels and you're curious reach out to the wit they have a facebook group you know reach out to dacowitz read their reports they have their reports are

every they're open source they're on the website they are they're very very in-depth very well done and interesting um talk to marines who are different and you'll see that that this work is being done it is being researched and studied in different ways um so some of the answers are out there we don't need to to reinvent the wheel but the more uh the more allyship um that can happen and brian i would call what you're doing allyship and john same for you and your efforts with this podcast um the more the generational change can come about and make the marine corps a little bit closer to what it could be brian and jeanette thank you for taking the time to discuss today before we wrap where can listeners connect with you on social media and what are you

guys working on next? Sure, thanks. I've got a few more articles pending publication with proceedings. But beyond that, as I'm sure you know, the School of Advanced Warfighting is very demanding, and I'm just trying to survive this process. But on social media, you can find me on Twitter at BrianKerg. And I'm also active on LinkedIn. So if any listeners want to have a conversation, please do hit me up. And, you know, I've got some RAND research coming out actually with a fellow Marine, Jocelyn Fleming. She's, I think, the one that connected us, John. I'm also, you know, doing some panel discussions with the Athena Leadership Project, specifically right now around LGBTQ plus personnel serving and what the 10 year anniversary of the repeal of DADT represents. I'm on Twitter. I'm not super active, but it's at Jeanette Haney, two N's in Jeanette.

um i i tend to i tend to lurk i don't tend to post a ton of stuff just because sometimes i i need the the hilarity that i can find on on twitter um as for what comes next um i'm not sure there's a bunch of things i've got some things in works right now i've got i'm teaching um and working on a book with my co-lead kylan hunter as well who's also a marine cover pilot um although i think her car is cooler than mine now. But just trying to figure out at this point how to get back to New Orleans, my hometown from Mardi Gras 2022, since we missed 20 in 2021 due to COVID. So very serious stuff going on here. But thank you so much for including me today. This has been fantastic. Jeanette and Brian really enjoyed the conversation and my sincere appreciation for

coming on the podcast today to discuss how we can close the gender barrier within the Naval Service. to the listeners. Thank you for listening. And until next time, Guten Tag! © BF-WATCH TV 2021