Women are leaving the forces for a multitude of reasons, and they're not just about promotions. Promotions and career progression would be a major factor for any woman who's worked so hard for her career. It's also about juggling all the other demands on her time with her career. If she's going to make the sacrifices and deploy for eight months to former Yugoslavia or any other theatre of war, she wants to be recognized and she wants to progress at the same rate as her peers, and according to the data, that's not happening.
Why isn't it happening? It's because what gets measured gets done, and in the units, we're not measuring the level of success and progress of women. We're not doing it at the military college level. When I sat on the board of governors for the military college, every year I said, “Why aren't we measuring the success of women?” We're measuring when they come in, when they're recruited, and then they fail out, and we don't ask why. We don't measure it. We don't observe it.
We need to get better data at every level. Corporations do this at every level. I worked for General Motors and Bombardier as an executive. We measured our DGMs at every step of their career to make sure we were doing the right things. When women weren't promoted, we did an analysis. We did problem-solving and wondered why we were losing our women. Sometimes it was work-life balance; other times it was career progression.