Where did it go wrong?
Now I’m well past a quarter-century in the Services so I can honestly say I have seen discrimination during all of my time. Back in flying training I can remember seeing females getting literally 10, 20 and nearly 100 more hours ‘flex’ training sorties compared to their male peers to get them graduated (the males were simply chopped, like a male calf in a dairy herd). I can remember a female aircrew mate explaining that she was afraid of the dark and the instructors going into a huddle to try and work out how she could get a front line job that she could do that didn’t involve night flying (I jest, not!). Seeing many female aircrew pushed forward for ‘good deals’, or over-promoted because of their appearance, whilst their male peers were overlooked.
However, that was set against a disgraceful environment where women had only just been paid the same as the men (only a couple of years earlier), that the women were instantly dismissed if they fell pregnant and that they were still expected to behave differently to their male counterparts. For the LGBTQ+ community, they had to live a secret life or face instant dismissal or even prosecution. The ethnic minorities suffered from the institutional racism of programmes like Alf Garnett and Rising Damp still resonating in the ‘80s and ‘90s. So all in all, everyone suffered a bit of discomfort and discrimination - so there was some equality!
By the turn of the Millenium, all those
except white males (and sometimes especially those of an older persuasion) were subject to, quite rightly, a clamp down on the discrimination shown against them - but we forgot to ensure that the white male was also in a good place (we assumed, but never checked). So the females started to shed the last of the very poor treatment, like gaining maternity leave, and we saw the final injustice levelled when they were allowed to join the RAF Regt. For the LGTBTQ+ they were now protected by law and their chosen private lives were rightly becoming normalised and accepted, even though quite a small community in the main. Finally, the ethnic minorities were similarly normalised, racial prejudices were rightly called out and they were accepted for who they are rather than a facsimile of what their white European counterparts thought they should be. But the white, possibly middle-aged, man got no quarter and even went on to be further pilloried for being so-called “privileged” by social justice warriors (and those that backed up their chosen leaders stating such stuff) and it was almost as if they were made to suffer for the behaviours of their predecessors even if their opinions and prejudices bore little resemblance to those that went before them. In today’s language we failed to ‘create a safe space’ for the white male, making them feel less worthy than their peers with different appearances and sexual preferences.
The situation for the white, and sometimes middle-aged, man continued to worsen and we saw the final recent perversion and heinous discrimination that we appear to be witnessing right now. Where some folks in very senior positions in leadership think it’s OK to cease all applications for aptitude based roles by white males but continue to allow female and ethnic minority applications to continue (as shown in the video clip above - there is no denying that this illegal activity was enacted). That is discrimination, I’m afraid, plain and simple.
What to do, to put it right? Stop trying to compartmentalise people into groups. Treat everyone as a person and individual, without significant favour. Ensure that we are the meritocracy, regardless of appearance, that we have prided ourselves previously in being. Be sympathetic to their protected characteristics, and most of all outlaw in all working practices any notion of quotas, or ‘discrimination to try and stop discrimination’ - meritocracy matters, and with that you will naturally get the diversity that you seek (the most valuable being diversity of thought). It really is that simple. But the really hard bit now is to restore the trust that the current very senior leaders have lost with the past, current and future generation of the Service over the past few years - that will probably require those recent culprits, who embraced and directed such heinous activities as seen recently in the various videos and leaks, to fall on their swords and leave without a fuss. Like the final scene in Where Eagles Dare
. That might give everyone left a common purpose to pull together and reconstruct the culture that appears to have been so badly damaged in the past 2-3 years.