Diversity and the Canadian Military: Part One
In Canada’s Defence Policy (“Strong, Secure, Engaged”), it says the Canadian Armed Forces must reflect the diversity of the country that we defend, and that we need a military that looks like Canada. You often hear the phrase “stronger together” here in the military family community. If the military wants to reach its goal, families will be a big part of the process. Dr. Lisa Gunderson discusses privilege, bias, and a few things for the military community to consider.
Listen via your favourite podcasting app
Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRADIO | Stitcher
Special Guest
Dr. Lisa Gunderson is an award-winning educator and frequent guest speaker on racial issues.
Highlights
- Privilege and if the Canadian Armed Forces is a privileged institution.
- 9:48 Implicit bias.
- Examples of bias in a military setting.
- 16:01 A perfect example of implicit bias.
- Some things for the military community to consider.
- 26:03 Culture change is absolutely possible.
Quotes
“Having these kind of conversations with people that’s going to support the Canadian Armed Forces larger goal. But it relies on all of us having conversations about these things to kind of make it a reality.”
-Dr. Lisa Gunderson
Connect
Links
- Improving Diversity and Inclusion in the Canadian Armed Forces
- Canada’s Defence Policy – Strong, Secure, Engaged
- One Love Consulting
Thank you
- This podcast is made possible by funding from True Patriot Love Foundation.
- Thank you to Organized Sound Productions for their help bringing this podcast to life.
Transcript by Otter.ai
Intro
This podcast is made possible by funding from True Patriot Love Foundation.
Lisa G
You can have good intentions and still have discriminatory outcome. And I think that’s really important for people to realize because I think people feel that they have to have negative intentions or be bad people to engage in discrimination. And that’s not the case. Most of the discrimination that many of us who are racialized space or minority space come from people who have good intentions. It’s not about the intention.
Intro
The military lifestyle is all encompassing. It’s difficult but rewarding. Dynamic, very, very dynamic. Unpredictable. You are in the Canadian Armed Forces, or a family member connected to the military. You know, the lifestyle can be a challenge. The military lifestyle is always changing. In this podcast, we explore the world of deployments, postings and transitions. This is The Military Lifestyle. Here’s your host, Jon Chabun.
Jon
In Canada’s Defence Policy, it says the Canadian Armed Forces must reflect the diversity of the country that we defend, and that we need a military that looks like Canada. We often use the phrase stronger together here in the military family community. Today I talk with award winning educator, guest speaker on racial issues, Dr. Lisa Gunderson about privilege, bias, and a few things for the military community to consider.
Thank you for coming.
Lisa G
Thank you for inviting me.
Jon
So, what is privilege? And is the Canadian Armed Forces a privileged institution?
Lisa
Great question. Yes, I’ll answer the second question. First. It is a privileged institution, but it’s not unique that way and most of our institutions in Canada are privileged institutions, primarily privileged to white men. And that is going to be shifting as our demographics shift. And when we think about privilege, the idea of privileges is just that you get some benefits for just being you. And these are not necessarily benefits and privileges and rights and honors that you receive, because you’ve done something necessarily special. But they’re kind of given to you because you represent a particular group. A quick example would be if you take your car to get it fixed. Back in the day, if you were a male, and you did that, you’d be given one price. But if you were a female with the exact same car, they would hike the price on you because they thought women don’t know cars. We can kind of get away with that. The men who got the other price. It’s not like they wanted that necessarily, right? It’s not like yeah, please let’s rip women off. That wasn’t idea. But they received the privilege just because they were presumed to know more about cars because they were guys. So that’s an example of privilege. And we all have privileges in different categories and in different ways. And so it’s just something that we all need to kind of become aware of.
Jon
And I, I look at myself, I’m, I’m a white male. And I always tell people, there’s like, I’m just a white guy. Sorry. But I know that myself, I’ve had probably opportunities just because I’m white and a male.
Lisa G
Yeah, I’m married to a white guy. And so I know that to be true that there’s certain things that he has been able to do. That would have been different for say, my father who’s a black man, right? And again, privileges usually based on perceived identification pieces. So your gender, your age, your religious affiliation. So we just finished celebrating Christmas, for example. So those of us who are Christian like myself, we have huge privileges, we get the holiday, the entire country stops for us for our holiday. They don’t stop for Ramadan or they don’t stop for Hanukkah or anything like that. So being Christian has a big privilege, right? We’re going to get Easter soon and Good Friday as well. And you can’t I think go into a store and not hear a Christmas carol. I’m pretty sure. So that’s an example. But again, sexual orientation is one. If you are heterosexual, you probably don’t think a lot about where you vacation, and if it’s going to be gay friendly. For example, we have also privilege being cisgender or gender identity. We also have privileges of course, like I said, being a woman there’s being a male, that’s the privilege for gender. And then ability status. So persons with invisible and visible disabilities, they don’t get certain privileges that those of us who don’t have those disabilities receive as well. There’s class, if you worry about how well they did the leaf on your carmel latte, you’re probably not worrying too much about where your next meal is coming from. Right? And there’s a lot of privilege with being middle class as well. So we have lots of different categories speaking English as we’re doing right now. That’s a privilege. Being a Canadian citizen. That’s a privilege. So the reason I’m giving all those different examples is I just want to show that all of us if we look at ourselves, we probably fall in some category of privilege. And part of our challenge is figuring out what our privileges are, and what power we get with those privileges, and what responsibilities come with those privileges as well.
Jon
And definitely the Canadian Armed Forces, I would say dominantly a white male population. I don’t think that’s. Some people would describe it as a hyper masculine environment and if you’re a female in this area that you’re probably going to have to adopt a male identity to thrive or …
Lisa G
Or fit in.
Jon
Or fit in. Yeah.
Lisa G
Right. It’s interesting because with regard to the military and what they want to do, they do want to be more reflective of the population that they serve. And right now, when you look at white men, they only represent about 26% of the population. So when you have such a small percentage in the regular population, right, white men, but they’re representing the majority of the people serving, then you’re having a problem, because we know and the military talks about this a lot. There’s so much strength, you were talking about being strong and there’s so much strength in diversity. We know across the board that companies that have more diverse people in it, that means women, indigenous persons, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, they not only are better in terms of finances, but they’re better in terms of operational status, how effective they are. So there’s a real reason why the military really wants to move towards increasing the amount of women they have, the amount of indigenous persons they have, and the amount of visible minorities they have has some of the groups, I really recommend to people who are listening, that if they’re really interested, the Canadian Armed Forces came out with a document called improving diversity and inclusion in the Canadian Armed Forces. And you can just Google that. That was in June of 2019. And it’s just a PDF. And it’s a big PDF. It’s about 80 pages, but I promise you, there’s certain sections you could just go to and it’s really interesting. And this was a report that came from the 42nd Parliament’s session from the Standing Committee on National Defense. And in that report, they talked about why it’s important for us to have diversity and inclusion. The Canadian Armed Forces intention on increasing especially in three areas, certain populations in the Forces. So for example, they want to increase by 2026. They want the military to have 25% of women. That’s one of their target goals. Right now, it’s only about 15%. They want to increase indigenous participation by three and a half percent, because it’s only at about two and a half. And then visible minorities, they want to jump to almost 12%. And it’s currently around seven. So they talk about these figures. They talk about why it’s important to have all these groups involved in our Forces. And they talk about a couple of things like recruiting, retaining, Operation Honour, which is having to deal with the sexual misconduct and all the things that have happened there, and something called Strong, Secure, Engaged. They give wonderful recommendations from a systemic level and operational level, even an individual level about what needs to happen to make our Armed Forces is a place that all young Canadian kids look at, you know, and think to themselves, I want to do this, I want to grow up, I want to do this. There are people who are interested in, I have something to offer. And there’s something for all people, all Canadians of all different diverse backgrounds. So I’m very excited that they’re interested in engaging in that. And it’s going to be tough to do, because of like what you said that it has been a certain type of environment for a really long time. And when you begin to shift people’s power and privilege begins to shift as well. And power never gives easily. But there are some wonderful things that are happening with that. It’s a really important goal that they’re trying to reach.
Jon
Explain implicit bias to me.
Lisa G
So a nice easy way I think, to understand implicit bias is by thinking about explicit bias actually, so when you look at, for example, the Ku Klux Klan, right, people who are kind of in-your-face racist, that would be an example of like an explicit bias. It’s like, oh, okay, yeah. Or women can’t be doctors ever. They’re not bright enough. Okay? Very big examples of explicit bias, we all could recognize that. I want you to picture for a second like an iceberg, because I always use icebergs to explain this. And the top of the iceberg that you can see above the water, that would be kind of like the explicit bias. But we know that the iceberg is actually quite large and much larger underneath the water, the part that you can’t see, think of that has the implicit bias. That is the kind of bias that is happening that we’re not really aware of. Another way to think about it is it’s kind of unconscious. It’s the kind of bias where when I am at Tim Hortons, for example, I have braided hair. A woman came up to me, and I was standing in line, and she put her hands on my hair. And she just flipped. I felt my hair kind of go up and then down. And I’m like, how did my hair move? And there’s no wind here in Tim Hortons. I turned around and this lady is looking at me, she goes, you have the loveliest hair. Now, she was operating out of her implicit bias. She didn’t necessarily realize that. But she was because she had made this conscious, actually unconscious decision to put her hands in my hair because she was interested in touching it and feeling it. And she didn’t think to maybe ask, she didn’t do any of those kind of things. Right? And that was her unconscious bias playing out. And that’s something that again, you’re usually not necessarily aware of that you do. It’s people who are making jokes, and they’re not necessarily meaning to offend. But that’s kind of what’s happening. So implicit biases, your unconscious bias at work your unconscious kind of prejudices, the way since its unconscious, how do you know that it’s happening? Well, the way that it kind of manifests or plays out, one of the ways is through something called microaggressions. And those are kind of like daily, verbal slights, daily behavioural slights, insults, things like that, that happened to people on kind of a regular basis. And even though it’s micro, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have macro implications. Micro just means it’s kind of small. It’s not like in your face type of like the examples I gave before. That’s one of the ways that this unconscious bias plays out, is through these kind of micro aggressions. And I can give some more examples of that later.
Jon
I know one just personally. My spouse, she’s Chinese, and born in Vancouver, but …
Lisa G
Yes.
Jon
That’s probably the, the, the obvious one, where are you from?
Lisa G
In fact, are Canadians who are of Chinese ancestry, or any of the groups underneath that Asian ancestry category, often are told, you know, where are you from? Oh, no, I’m from Vancouver. No, no, no, like, Where are you from? Surrey? No, like, Where are you from? And that’s an example of a great microaggression. And both in Canada and in the United States, persons of Asian backgrounds are often called eternal foreigners. And that’s that idea that it’s not possible for us to have been born here in Canada, you know, if you are not of a white European background, and so that’s an example, a wonderful example of that.
Jon
Now, what are some examples of bias in a military setting that people might hear?
Lisa G
If you take a woman, for example, and she’s in a uniform, and maybe she’s like, oh, you’re in the military? That kind of, uhh, really, and especially if she’s in any kind of combat role. Oh. It’s just that simple oh, and what that is linking to is, wow, you’re a woman, though. And women are supposed to not be fighting. And if they are, they’re not supposed to be strong. And we have this picture of what a military person looks like, and especially a combat person, and you should it’s going to be a male who’s a certain size and speaks in a certain way.
Jon
It’s the warrior, right?
Lisa G
Exactly, exactly. And if you think about it, historically, women have always been warriors. There’s lots of great warrior women, but we don’t really learn a lot about them. That’s part of this unconscious bias, we don’t learn about them in history. Kids aren’t learning about the commanders and the generals that were perhaps women. And so that translates down into just our regular day shock. When we see women has in the military, that would be one of the ways and not as a receptionist, or in a support staff role. It’s the same thing with leadership as well, depending on who our military leaders are, and if they are female, that’s often shocking to them. And then if you add certain cultural groups, like imagine an indigenous female military leader, a lot of people would be shocked by that. We have to ask ourselves, why would we be shocked by that? And it’s because we have certain stereotypes about how we think women should be, how indigenous people should be, how other ethnic groups should be. And it doesn’t fit with the stereotypes that we have of how the military should be and how the military has been. Right in the past.
Jon
I’ll share an example of me putting my foot in my mouth. Yes, one time I, I met a military spouse. I was talking to him and he was he was he was intrigued. He didn’t really know much about the Military Family Resource Centre. Wanted to know what I did there. And I asked where his wife worked. You could see where this is going, right?
Lisa G
Totally.
Jon
Yeah. And it turned out his, his husband was a Ranger and yeah, I put my foot in my mouth. He corrected me right away, and I apologized. And we moved on. But yeah, I immediately said that I knew that was so stupid but I said it.
Lisa G
Yeah, no, but that’s a perfect example. And you illustrate in that example, a couple things like one is this idea that we’ve kind of in our minds made it if people are going to be a certain way, make certain mistakes that they have to be, for example, racist and sexist and all of these things. As opposed to no, I’m just a person. And all people make mistakes. And we make assumptions. Right? And that’s a perfect example of that. You weren’t intending to do anything wrong. You weren’t, you didn’t mean it’s just an assumption that you made. And that’s one of the things that’s really important is that we all kind of make those assumptions and figuring out oh, wow, why did I make that assumption? Oh, okay. And then this person corrected you. And you’re like, okay, note to self. Wow. And then you move on, and it hits in all different ways, sexual orientation, or gender, or we carry all of that kind of stuff with us. And I think it’s really important that what’s beautiful about what you said is you didn’t get defensive with that. You weren’t like oh my gosh, I didn’t mean that the end just go off, you listen to what he had to say. And then apologized and then move forward. And I think that’s really, I don’t know if you realize it, but you gave a really good example of how we can take correction from somebody when we do make an implicit bias mistake, how to listen to taking the correction and then making the change. And you have that note for yourself for the future. And that’s really, that’s really important and not getting caught up with intention.
Jon
That’s not going to happen again, I hope.
Lisa G
You will make the different mistakes.
Jon
I’ll make different mistakes. Wonderful!
Lisa G
But it’s one of those things where I think it’s really important to understand that and this isn’t mine. The Current, the Current Institute talks about this, that you can have good intentions and still have discriminatory outcome. And I think that’s really important for people to realize because I think people feel that they have to have negative intentions or be bad people to engage in discrimination. And that’s not the case. Most of the discrimination that many of us who are racialized face or minorities face come from people who have good intentions. So we can’t get caught up in intention. It’s not about whether you had good or bad intention, you will still have a discriminatory outcome. It’s not about the intention.
Jon
And with a lot of our military spouses, if we’re talking about majority of the military members being white, being male, than a lot of the military spouses have traditionally been female. But that can be changing.
Lisa G
Absolutely. Yeah, it could be changing and it will likely change as well, just like the demographic is likely going to change as well. And one of the things that as military families, we it’s an interesting thing, and I said we because my husband was a gulf war vet, he served in the Marines. And one of the things that I think is supported and to realize is that within the military itself, because of the nature of the work that is done, there’s this incredible opportunity to welcome in diversity. Because at the end of the day, we have each other’s backs. And that’s so important. Part of what we need to think about doing is how are we making sure that we’re putting diversity and inclusion into and equity into our own family structure? What are we doing to make sure that, like you said, we’re kind of expanding our ideas of who is a military family, who is a military spouse, what does that look like? And part of the way to do that is to get to know each other better. Get to know military families, get to know the diversity that’s happening within our communities and neighbourhoods and making conscious efforts of getting out there and getting involved with other communities and other types of people and reading things from other groups and watching things on TV and listening to various podcasts, and just kind of expanding our knowledge base about kind of what’s out there. That kind of thing is going to be so helpful, giving us examples outside of kind of our little kind of nuclear family about the different types of families that are out there who are going to be coming and joining into the military fold.
Jon
When it comes to being more diverse. What are some things for the military and I guess, the military community to consider?
Lisa G
One of the things that I would love for everybody to take a look at is that report that I mentioned earlier, and the only reason I’m suggesting that is they give some really excellent recommendations of things they’re doing at a systemic level. The reason why that’s important is I think it’s important for people to know what the military is currently doing and expecting of its members and, therefore, kind of their families as well. And I think if you understand some of the things that are happening there, then that is going to be helpful in terms of what holding certain people accountable. I’ll give you an example. One of the examples that they’re doing right now is they are putting in community elders for indigenous recruits. And they are actually having them consulting with indigenous leaders to figure out how do we go out and encourage young indigenous people to come in and join into the military. So they’re making some active moves in that way. They are also doing things like thinking about recruiting. And one of the recommendations non-citizens, which is something we haven’t really thought a lot about. I’m a permanent resident. I’m not a Canadian citizen as a right now, I could not do anything in the military. But that may change soon in terms of having non-Canadian citizens but permanent residents begin to think about the idea. Want to become a citizen, think about joining the military. How does that translate into like a military family? Well, you may have friends who are permanent residents like myself. Talk to us about the benefits of being in the military. What does that look like and encouraging us to think about getting citizenship, and encouraging us to think about making the military a part of our life, that’s something that would be of interest. Operation Honour, is a big thing that the military is doing right now. And that is dealing with sexual misconduct, and dealing with sexual assaults. And one of their four points is that they understand the problem, respond to incidents of sexual assaults, support people who have been sexually assaulted, and then also preventing sexual misconduct from occurring. That’s something directly that families can think about. Understand what is sexual misconduct and sexual assault for your family, for your community, for the military itself. And if you have somebody who you hear about who has an incident, you know, encourage them to talk about that to report it. This is the kind of thing that would be so helpful support. If you have somebody in your family where that has happened, support them about coming forward and doing something about that, and talk about prevention. So this is us talking with our kids about what kind of behaviour should we be engaged in with people who we are working with, people you go to school with? Like, what kind of behavior is respectful behaviour? Because these are the tenants of one of the core things the military has been talking about the Armed Forces is respect, trust and cohesion. So are we seeing that with our children with the way that they interact with each other? Having these kind of conversations with people that’s going to support the Canadian Armed Forces larger goal of something like Operation Honour, they’ve set up this kind of systemic idea. But it relies on all of us having conversations about these things to kind of make it a reality. An example of one of the things that the Armed Forces is really doing that is going to be very important to increasing diversity. Because if we want more women to come into the fold, we need to make sure that it’s a place once they get there that they want to stay. Because as it makes sense to recruit people if you can’t retain them, and so we need them to understand that yes, not only do we want to hear, but we’re going to make sure that this is a place where you can give your best. And we’re going to set up environments that work that way.
Jon
One of my favorite quotes is culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Lisa G
Yes.
Jon
It’s Peter Drucker.
Lisa G
It does.
Jon
So when you apply that to the military setting. What does the military need to do to better embrace diversity, and now is a culture change possible?
Lisa G
Culture change is absolutely possible. And history teaches us that. The fact that you have women in the Armed Forces now is a culture shift. It needs to get better without question. I’m just talking about just the idea that women are there. This is the same institution that would spy on its gay members. That has been a culture shift. So I think it’s really important. Oftentimes, we lose sight of history, and where we’ve come from, and that should always be a place of just in my mind, excitement in terms of wow, okay. We have the ability to do this. So never believe when people say no, we can’t make the Armed Forces a place that women can’t be, indigenous people can’t be, visible minorities can’t be, of course we can. Well, no, it’s too big, that it’s just going to be too tough. The culture is always been this kind of tough white male culture forever, it won’t change. That’s not true. History shows us that it can change, and it’s starting to change. So really, the first thing is for us to “A” believe that. But what’s really important is that we have to let people know from the top of leadership all the way down, because at the end of the day, we’re hierarchical structure. So we have to let people know that we are going to be the Canadian Armed Forces, a reflection of our population, period, because it makes us stronger. As an Armed Forces, it makes us more operationally effective. It is not only a model for us as a nation, but also to the world and to our partners as well. We believe so strongly in this, we are willing to put our money, our time, our policies into making that happen. If you think about that type of attitude, and believing in that type of attitude, then you can have the shifts and changes that we’re talking about. Part of the issue is you have people who are in the system who don’t believe what I just said. They don’t believe that increasing diversity does actually lead to better outcomes. They don’t necessarily believe that adding in these groups and making some shifts and changes is actually going to be beneficial. They’re not convinced of that. Part of what we need to figure out is, if you aren’t open to the idea of that reality, is this the place that you need to be serving? And that’s really kind of tough line. But it’s kind of one of those lines that I think is really important for people to really think about. I want people to think about the Canadian Armed Forces. When you think about it, I want you to think about, wow, this is the place where any person of any type could come and serve their country. And that’s not how people image it right now. That’s not how they image it. So we have to make that shift in making that image happen. One of the ways that that can be done, and they’re talking about this is online with their advertisement. They show that when they put women in ads, and they show those two young millennials and people going, they’re like, oh, oh, okay. You need to see yourself represented. So we have to see more commercials, more advertisements of women, indigenous persons, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, we need to see those images that are out there representing the Canadian Armed Forces.
Jon
I’m going to continue this conversation on the next episode, including a few ways for you to reduce your bias. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Dr. Gunderson, you can visit her website at oneloveconsulting.com.
Extro
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Military Lifestyle. To learn more about this episode, and to check out our other resources like the Deployment App, go to EsquimaltMFRC.com. A special thanks to True Patriot Love Foundation for funding season one of this podcast and to Organized Sound Productions for bringing our idea to life. Please share this podcast with your military family or with someone living the lifestyle. Subscribe to The Military Lifestyle on your favorite podcast app. Your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening.
