There's a long way to go, but I think you have the right pieces.
What we need to start thinking about is how we change the entry level to make sure that we're not perpetuating a culture that we don't want to see in the Canadian Armed Forces. There are a few ways to do this, and I'll give you an example. This is one thing that really upset me when I was teaching at RMC. I would have young women cadets come to my office and say, “I'm not staying the course. I'm going to get out of the forces in the next couple of years.” I never got that from my male students.
There is an anecdotal element to it that's not a statistically significant piece, but I tried to figure out where it was coming from. There was the sense that you don't get it in other professions. I've never met a women engineer who says, “It's such a male-dominated domain that the culture is unbearable. I want out.” What's happening in other male-dominated careers is that performance is measured objectively, whereas when you go to the military, you wind up with a performance measure that is not always objective. I'm looking specifically at the physical training systems and physical training exams, which are measuring upper body fitness or your capacity to do push-ups, for example.
When you're measuring these male-dominated qualities, rather than things like agility, endurance and those gender-neutral physical traits, you're creating an unfair premise of what it means to be a soldier. I'll give you an example. It takes 38 push-ups for women and 77 push-ups to get the right score. What happens behind the scenes is that you have these students getting a sense that they are twice the soldier that someone else is on campus, because they had to do twice as many push-ups to get that excellent score.
We were talking about royalty in the previous hour. If you want to get treated like royalty at RMC, you have to get 450 points on your physical test. You'll be part of the 450 club, you'll get a t-shirt, and the people who work in the physical training department will befriend you. There's a sense that you're very special if you're very good at this. When I was around, it was mostly young guys who were winning it.