November 2005

 

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) has earned praise for “significant and substantial progress in gender integration” through clear leadership, in its first comprehensive gender review since the groundbreaking Burton Report of 1998. The Burton Report followed a high-profile Navy sexual harassment case taken to the Human Rights Commission, and recommended comprehensive changes in institutional attitudes to women and gender.

 

Since then significant culture-change has occurred, says the independent Review of Progress in Gender Integration in the New Zealand Defence Force, released last month. Harassment has decreased dramatically from 129 complaints in 1997 to 34 in the last financial year, and there are increasing numbers of women in all three branches – army, navy and air force. 

 

More than ever, there is a high awareness and low tolerance of sexual harassment within the NZDF, and harassment is increasingly “seen as a fairness issue rather than a gender issue,” according to the report. The new policies and support systems in place around harassment are generally seen as positive, although in need of better implementation, training-support and an overhaul of monitoring.

 

EEO Commissioner Judy McGregor praised the NZDF for undertaking a publicly available EEO stocktake. “There’s an old EEO saying that what gets counted and measured gets done. The Gender Integration review could be a blueprint for other major organisations who want to ensure they are being fair to all men and women at work. The NZDF deserves a pat on the back for examining how it’s going,” said McGregor.

 

The army, navy and air force did have some markedly different results, with the navy having outstripped the air force in increasing its numbers of women. The navy has gone from 12.3% to 20.9% female since 1990, while the air force started higher, on 15.4% in 1990, but has only increased to 16.9% over the same period. NZDF Human Resources Manager (Policy) Laura Gillan grants that “it is not always easy or successful to ‘cut and paste’ an idea that has been successful in one Service into another.” Although there are overarching policies, “we are one organisation but we include three cultures.”

 

A strategic EEO approach is still lacking, with the report finding that there is still “a resistance to considering the role of gender in HR processes.” Many within the Defence Forces are still grappling with the difference between being ‘gender-neutral’ (e.g. correcting for the ways that an HR process might affect men and women differently and inequitably) and ‘gender-blind’ (i.e. an HR process that assumes people are ‘the same’). "We are talking about cultural, systemic and attitudinal change,” said Gillan, “we are committed to continuous improvement… We certainly don’t want to rest on our laurels.”