Originally Posted by
Bob Viking
You are absolutely correct. Targeted advertising and recruitment is not a bad thing. Every human from any socio-economic group of any gender/race/sexuality should understand that they are welcome to join the RAF and the wider armed forces. That is correct and fair.
Beyond that though the numbers should be irrelevant. You can’t make people join the RAF (I think the Navy used to do exactly this though as recently as 200 years ago) and you really shouldn’t turn anyone away based on any protected characteristic.
Fair treatment and equality of opportunity should be sacrosanct. For all humans who wish to join the RAF.
I’m afraid I can’t be convinced otherwise. Please notice how I have chosen my language before you try.
BV
I agree totally, except that you should use the numbers as a measure of how effective your targetted recruitment/advertising is. I suppose you *might* find that a particular group is underrepresented because many of them are pacifists, in which case there's probably not much you can do, but otherwise if your cohort isn't representative of the general population it probably points to a problem somewhere; either you're missing out on applicants or people are leaving because the environment doesn't welcome them. But you fix that problem at source, not by counter-discriminating during the selection process.