Mark Rowe continues his look at ‘women in security’, based on numerous events and conversations in 2022.
If some employers want their security workforce to have more women, and cannot recruit many, how to promote the industry to young people? Maybe, one woman said, we need to change the very word security to something else, such as community safety. Except that the average outgoing student will only see Security as someone (usually a man) on a pub door, or at a supermarket. There may be more to do at university freshers and leavers’ fairs, ideally showing women and men in the jobs, so that young people know about security, whereas they don’t need telling about the law, or medicine, or accountancy.
That implies a difference between the generations; and younger people (men and women) feeling that the older generation has created these problems (and older women may be as at fault as men; just as Margaret Thatcher as prime minister was suspected of not promoting other women to the Cabinet, so women in higher positions in security are not necessarily virtuously helping others to the boardroom table).
One woman urged recruiters to take masculine words out of job descriptions (such as powerful and dynamic). Hiring managers don’t want to see the same type of people. The National Health Service has taken this to heart particularly. Men, some women suspect, might ‘shoo in’ a mate from the same regiment for a job – if women don’t help other women that way, is that a fault? Women advise others not to doubt and to just apply for a job, and not to take the job description too literally, if it’s asking for qualifications (the person writing the advert may not know what the job requires and puts the qualifications in only as a pointer). HR, one woman suggested to me, might be open to meeting for a coffee and talking about the job’s day to day basis, because that would be useful all round – a job title that sounds desirable might not turn out what you expect.
Just as calling out of bad behaviour implies that the one calling out has to feel empowered, so those who are making progress ‘need to give back’, as one woman said; ‘we probably need to be there for each other more’.
Issues are not only true regardless of gender (‘gender neutral’ in the jargon) but connected – how to get experience after you graduate – by gaining an academic qualification, or by building social media or other skills, or the right attributes in your head, such as self-esteem. Cultural shifts, one woman said, are happening, such as the power of social media, that for all its faults engages people, and can (such as TikTok postings, even the right hashtag) expose people to private security and can change young minds.
Much, well within living memory, has changed for the better. The 1970s when Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord’s cricket ground could still refuse to have women members, and before the first female prime minister, feels long gone. It has been accepted that women can do the job of security, and do it well. And if some women don’t perform well, some men don’t either. Hence the need for the right people in the right roles.
Women feel strongly about better workplaces, and why shouldn’t they? ‘I actually feel we could be on the cusp of something, of a change and something good,’ I heard one long-time security woman say in 2022.
What, then, might a more women-friendly, more 50:50 male-female security industry look like? Your stories about rugby and what you said to another bloke over a previous drink may not be treated as amusing or appealing. Instead of (male) sport, you may have to participate in conversations about female sport, or Harry Styles.
What do women want? To feel comfortable to be whatever it is they want to be.
Picture by Mark Rowe; a replica of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet table, at the National Archives, Kew.
