I disagree with the lot of you. Joe Public tends to think that an RAF pilot is indeed male and white - and that is, in the majority of cases, true. Consequently, we don't get, proportionally, sufficient applications from those who are not male and white. However, if we want to be the most effective, lethal, and capable force that we can be, then we need the best talent applying, regardless of gender, creed or colour. So it is entirely sensible to make an effort to get Joe Public to realise that we recruit wider than just white males. This (poorly worded) is part of the effort to do this.

So get the hell off the outrage bus, you antediluvian relics!

RedLine, you are Sarah, and I claim my £5 lol.

CG

Damn - Busted!

I respectfully disagree.
If any other characteristics were used apart from "White" & "Male" this would of been rightly been slammed as discriminatory.
Do we see campaigns where female nurses & primary teachers are banned, to encourage more males into the profession for example?
I understand its PR, so the RAF are perfectly within their rights to select the person best suited to project the image they want.
But that should be done by selecting the best person for the job from the willing candidates, not by excluding specific groups.
Not to mention it completely undermines all the women who have worked their arses off to become a pilot in the RAF. By perpetuating the myth that women have been selected purely based on their sex, rather than their skill set.

Im all for ensuring that everyone has an equal chance at getting the role & encouraging more women into flying.
But discrimination is discrimination

Men & Women do generally have different interests and thus even given the same opportunities, there will always be imbalance in different professions.
Saying an organisation is inherently biased against one sex because there isn't a 50/50 M/F split, is simplistic nonsense

RLE
 

I think you’ve missed the point of the outrage. I don’t think anybody cares who shows up at the event, although I think we can all agree that it will be a pilot.

The point is that discrimination is abhorrent in whatever form it takes. Openly discriminating against white males is no less shameful than discriminating against anyone else.

I am still standing by to find out that this was just a well played wind-up from someone with too much time on their hands though.

BV

Let me replay your argument back to you.

1. We want the best to apply, regardless of what they look like or what genitals they have
2. It's OK for the RAF to actively discriminate against - and be seen to be discriminating against - a demographic that comprises around 40% of the recruitment pool because they have the wrong colour skin and the wrong genitals

What you've generously characterised as "making an effort to get Joe Public to realise that we recruit wider than just white males" sounds very unwise to me unless what you really care about is equality of outcome?

And this is why nobody under the age of 65 uses pprune.

Thought I saw a RAF 5th generation broom stick with the name Sarah on it.

It's clearly been a while since some people on this forum did their D&I training...
Seeking to engage with people who are not white and not male to promote employment in the RAF is not discrimination; it is positive action, which is legal under the Equality Act 2010. From Bristol University: (Linky)The legislation encourages employers to take positive action to ensure they can recruit and retain people from under-represented groups as long as this does not mean less favourable treatment for other people. For instance:

• Including statements encouraging applications from under-represented groups.
• Targeting advertising to reach under-represented groups.

For a discrimination case to succeed, you would have to demonstrate (as a white, male pilot) that your inability to apply for this temporary activity resulted in a harm or disadvantage to yourself. Judging by some of the comments about the banter suffered following such 'fame', I think that it might be difficult to prove!!!

Wouldn't be a SAGA if that wasn't true! ;)

Bristol University ... I rest my case, m'Lud.

At the bottom of this post is a team that selects itself because it wants to have the very best chance of winning. There are no ‘quotas’, no ‘must reflect the make up of society’ and no ‘woke agendas’. The Armed Forces are the same, especially in a war-fighting role like Aircrew, where we pick a team with the best chance of winning regardless of what they look like. Can we imagine how badly we would do if we selected our 100m team on the basis of appearance rather than performance? Thankfully we don’t and the teams look like this because they are represented by the best that can be found in the UK…

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....6b5cab1f6.jpeg

I guess I’m largely blind to all this cr@p. Partly educated in Jamaica, as the only English boy in my boarding school. As an ATCO, worked with M/F and multiple ethnicities.

But Recruiting has its own imperatives, sadly. I had to work with J Walter Thompson to produce a new RAF ATC recruiting leaflet. That tried my patience!

Ah, some lovely views here:
Currently, 3.3% of the RAF is BAME (source at Linky), whereas across the UK population, 14% are BAME. So the fact is WE DO SELECT BY APPEARANCE - because too many BAME individuals who would be great in the RAF do not apply in the first place. Why don't they apply? Because they don't perceive themselves as welcome, they don't see any role models who look like them, and when they do see RAF pilots in the spotlight, they normally see someone who is white and male.

This is not about denigrating those of us who are white blokes (I'm one) - it's about making the effort to show that we want people from all backgrounds. Not because it's woke, but because it means we can then select the very best talent from those who do apply. And because then we can be better at doing that non-woke thing that we primarily exist for: killing the Queen's enemies!

How times have changed.

It wasn't that long ago that I was volunteered to take part in a Ethnic Minority Recruiting Event at RAF Cosford. "I" being a pretty bog standard white male...

​

Surely the simplest way and to be all inclusive pilot wise is to run the RAF TopGun advert something like this… no gender, no colour.. no race…


https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5b304041d.jpeg
x

Fair call, Red Line Entry 👍

In an earlier life I was pleased to be able to write the letter saying our Branch (ATC) had NO female quota … unlike all the other Branch Sponsors who had responded to the query. We always took the best person for the job, regardless of the shape of the sweater.

And colour never came in to the debate … I worked with a controller mate of Caribbean origin who served in WW2. We had 2 with the same surname on the Unit, so one was known as xxx Blanc and the other as xxx Noir. And we all just got on with the job.

So perhaps, yes, we should advertise the incredible diversity and talent that certainly existed in my dinosaur days and (hopefully) still exists today.

What this dude said. Sadly most don't get the concept of aiming to recruit representative to the population, to ensure you can choose the best but also a host of other moral reasons. They also don't seem to understand that targeted advertising can be a thing without discriminating at the selection process.

15 years ago, the cover of The Officers' Bulletin" always had a picture of four junior officers on the front cover: the Army officer was female; the RAF Officer was black; and the two remaining officers, RN and Royal Marines, were white male. It was difficult to see which of these two was gay.

The OH was a Recruiter and Schools Liaison. The system was colour-blind, but at one mainly black school the girls said they wouldn't join because they would have to wear tan tights! This was, of course, in the 70s … has the World moved on?