National Defence committee  It's to have that as part of our discussions and just teach women to be better mentors, to be the mentors that we never had.

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  Again, I'm going to speak only anecdotally because I don't know all of the data. I know for certain that the process is slow because of language. The process is slow because of a lack of investigators. I think some of the main reasons women are not coming forward are backlash,

National Defence committee  I don't know about the structure of the army. I think that's been tested and evolved. It needs to be very hierarchical for leadership reasons. I'm not sure I would challenge that. Certainly, the way women fit in that environment needs to be challenged. I'll give you an example.

National Defence committee  Again, it depends. A Spanish battalion was a little different from a British battalion, and the Dutch were very welcoming of women. In terms of scale, I saw a range. My presence was polarizing in most situations.

National Defence committee  Thank you.

National Defence committee  I have two points with regard to what you were saying. The first one is that I think people need to understand that we are recruiting our soldiers from 26% of the population when we recruit mostly white men. That's economic data. The other point is that I think men hold most of

National Defence committee  I would suggest that Israel is one of the benchmarks in the industry for women serving in combat. We could learn a lot from them. I don't know about other countries—

National Defence committee  I know. I don't think there is anybody out there who is in the forefront of embracing diversity as much as Canada. We are 25 years in front of the U.S. and many other countries, but there are best practices out there. I would say that we need to go outside of the military and lo

National Defence committee  Quite frankly, it depends on the tour. There was progression. My last tour in Croatia, the three myths around women with regard to physical fitness, group cohesion and operational effectiveness were debunked. My platoon hit three anti-tank mines, and we survived a lot of attack

National Defence committee  Yes, absolutely.

National Defence committee  No, I wouldn't say anyone is empowered to put their own teams in place. I think, at the very high level, they are pushing their teams to certain areas. At the unit level, they don't have much say on who comes to them to be part of their unit and be leaders in their unit. They are

National Defence committee  Some coaching courses are offered to the military, but there's nothing current that I know of that I would say is a standard operating procedure at a certain level. I think it would be brilliant.

National Defence committee  Why are we not measuring the success of women at every single level, including all the other DGMs as well? I speak mostly about women, but I would add the DGMs in there. Why aren't we doing that?

National Defence committee  Absolutely. It's not just in correspondence; I have close friends who have gone through it. They have been removed from their unit and put to work in a different section, sometimes in the same building or on the same floor as their aggressor. Those are anecdotes I've heard before