Across global security institutions, caring responsibilities are reshaping who can deploy, who can lead and who remains in uniform.
New research from Monash University’s Global Peace and Security research hub, funded by Global Affairs Canada as part of the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations, suggests these pressures are undermining operational readiness, deployment capability, retention and leadership pathways across defence, policing and peace operations.
The findings are already informing institutional reform efforts within the UN system and international peacekeeping training.
The research project is titled ‘Advancing the Meaningful Participation of Women in UN Peace Operations by Supporting Personnel with Caring Responsibilities’. It is the first of its kind to investigate the causes and consequences of marginalising women with caring responsibilities from military and police organisations in troop and police contributing countries and UN peace operations. In UN peace operations, women are around 10 percent of uniformed personnel, despite sustained policy commitments to improve this figure under the Women, Peace and Security agenda and the UN Uniformed Gender Parity Strategy.
The project’s findings were drawn from a global survey and interviews with 553 uniformed personnel and stakeholders across 63 countries, including peacekeepers deployed to missions in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The research reveals a systemic problem affecting recruitment, deployment, retention and career progression.
As unpaid care work disproportionately falls on women, they feel the effects particularly acutely. Nearly half the women surveyed said caring responsibilities had negatively affected their career progression (47 percent), training opportunities (38 percent) or deployment opportunities (39 percent) or caused them to leave or change roles within the security sector (45 percent).
The barriers are intersecting and mutually reinforcing. Long working hours and inflexible schedules clash with school drop-offs and childcare closures. Workplace cultures that prize constant availability and presenteeism penalise those who cannot – or will not – pretend they have no family. Maternal bias can cause assumptions that mothers are less committed, less deployable and less capable. Women with caring responsibilities are often denied deployment opportunities or assumed they would not be interested in deploying. When they do deploy, they can be regarded as bad mothers or selfish, or be expected to be unable to cope with family separation (a known stressor on operations for all peacekeepers, not just women).
These challenges are often treated as private matters for individuals to manage. In reality, they are institutional design problems with direct operational consequences. Organisations that fail to support personnel with caring responsibilities lose experienced staff, narrow their talent pools and undermine long-term capability.
Research consistently shows that diverse peace operations improve community engagement, trust-building and civilian protection outcomes. This project further found that personnel managing caring responsibilities often developed skills highly relevant to operational environments, including crisis management, negotiation, empathy and adaptive leadership.
Excluding or losing experienced personnel because organisations cannot accommodate caring responsibilities weakens missions. It also signals that the skills associated with care, including self-care, are undervalued, contributing to harmful workplace cultures, burnout and safeguarding risks.
Conversely, organisations that support personnel with caring responsibilities strengthen capability, improve retention, enhance well-being, build healthier workplace cultures and improve operational outcomes.
One female military officer said:
If we only have people in security institutions whose lives [have] been untouched by family responsibilities, not only do we have an incredibly [small] recruiting pool, but we have an incredibly limited viewpoint of the world and we will make bad decisions.
The good news is that practical solutions exist. This project has produced a comprehensive organisational toolkit containing 15 evidence-based tools for defence and police institutions. This includes care audits, bias interruption tools for selection panels, deployment checklists, family care plan templates and a communications strategy.
The project report contains evidence-informed recommendations for the United Nations; troop and police contributing countries; armed forces and police; and individual personnel. They address policy reform, workplace culture change, flexible working arrangements, investment in care infrastructure, training, and the elimination of gender and maternal bias in deployment and career-progression decisions.
Project outputs also include policy briefs and global good practice, with examples from countries such as Britain, Canada, Norway, Uruguay and Ghana. These countries are already implementing promising practices, including flexible working arrangements, shared parental leave, subsidised childcare and carer’s passports.
Importantly, the project has moved beyond diagnosis to implementation. Its findings informed the development of Family Responsibilities and Care, a new free online course launched by the Peace Operations Training Institute, which trains thousands of peacekeepers and uniformed personnel globally. The course provides practical guidance on balancing care responsibilities with work, and on what individuals, leaders and organisations can do to build more inclusive, care-attentive workplace cultures.
Momentum for reform is growing. UN personnel briefed on the findings earlier this month described the research as long overdue and committed to advocating for institutional change. Defence and policing organisations in several countries are also beginning to experiment with more flexible and inclusive approaches to deployment, retention and workforce support. The question is no longer whether caring responsibilities affect operational capability but whether institutions are willing to adapt to that reality.
Supporting personnel with caring responsibilities is not a concession or a soft workplace issue. It is a strategic investment in capability, retention, leadership and mission effectiveness. Institutions that fail to adapt risk losing highly skilled personnel and weakening operational performance. Those that do adapt will be better positioned to meet the complex security challenges of the future.
The full project outputs are available in multiple languages (English, French, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesian and Hindi). They are also featured on the United Nation’s Elsie Initiative Fund website.
