We have established a Defence Women's Action Board that actively addresses and delivers solutions to the issues affecting women in Defence and Security. This distinction is important as we want to be as inclusive as possible and that includes women from the Armed Forces - serving and veterans, Industry, Academia, and Government as well as those in the Police, Fire, Blue Light, and Emergency Services. After the Atherton report, it was announced that there would be funding to address these issues, but it's currently not transparent where this is or how it will be allocated. We want to help that happen! Plus much more.
• We have done this on Discord as it provides the most cost-effective and secure way of achieving this.
• We have established cloud storage on Dropbox for shared assets to support individual women and businesses to shortcut the cost and time of creating them from scratch.
We are NOT gatekeeping any of this - this needs to be owned and exploited by everyone that joins in. Far too many initiatives are behind a wall of ‘someone else’ and we absolutely want the opposite of that.
• We have provided funding for bus passes for young students to get to class.
• We have provided laptops for young women who just cannot afford the tech that will enable their work and studies.
• We have provided practical mentoring on an individual and group basis - from individual meetings to guest lecturing at universities. Let’s get out there more!
The future goal is to formalise the funding pot for women and girls to access without a massive and onerous application process - this is about action and getting things done, albeit with some checks and balances.
If you are an organisation looking to fund/sponsor action in this area please do get in touch below.
The brilliant support provided by our sponsors this year has enabled our establishment, funded the creation of the platform, the meetings, and socials, and facilitated much more through those meetings.
These are the initial goals that have come out of the survey, meetings, and engagement so far. These will be added to! Please ADD YOUR OWN! This is absolutely YOUR action group, YOUR way of solving problems, and OUR way of changing our world and that of the younger women and girls coming up behind us.
The actions we are kicking off with:
• Menopause policy - expensive and time-consuming to write up and implement - take what is there and adapt to your own needs.
• Standard business documents - NDAs, MOUs, contract T&Cs etc. Let’s not reinvent the wheel but use what our talent has produced already and adapt it/improve on it together.
We have had 2 in-person meetings in 2022, as well as our first social! We can’t wait to get cracking with more.
FINALLY (For now!) The DWAB is not here to replace or compete with other networks - rather it is a hub of the sum of all of our knowledge, energies, and brilliance! Individual networks for different areas are incredibly important for those involved to address issues that are pertinent to them. What we have found is that many, many of the issues raised in different channels are experienced by women across defence and we’re here to enable action across all areas.
How it all started: ruddynice.com/the-loss-of-talent-in-security-and-defence
