Army 'encourages women to leave', says Chief of the General Staff

General Sir Nick Carter says the Army must change to allow women to reach the top ranks British female troops share a joke as they wait for the 904 Expeditionary Air Wing's sunset flag lowering and end of mission ceremony at Kandahar airfield, Afghanistan British female troops share a joke as they wait for the 904 Expeditionary Air Wing's sunset flag lowering and end of mission ceremony at Kandahar airfield, Afghanistan Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images By Holly Watt, Whitehall Editor The structure of the Army “encourages women to leave” and must be reformed to allow women to reach the top, according to the head of the service. General Sir Nicholas Carter, the Chief of the General Staff, said that the Army had been bent “significantly out of shape” by its long deployment in Afghanistan and that his priority now was “to restore our Army’s readiness”. Speaking at Chatham House, a foreign affairs think-tank, Gen Carter said that the Army would have to use a variety of strategies to improve “readiness”, including increasing recruitment among ethnic minorities and retaining more women. Gen Carter said that the changing make-up of the population meant that by the end of the decade, a quarter of recruits “will need to come from the black-Asian”. "Demography is changing. The traditional cohort whence we recruited - 16-to-25-year-olds, white Caucasian - is shrinking," he said. Related Articles Gen Sir Nick Carter said the Army Reserves are 'certainly not' intended to off-set cuts to Regular forces Reservists are no replacement for regular troops, head of Army says 28 Oct 2014 Women can fight on the front line. Now the battle begins 06 Dec 2014 British sniper in Afghanistan kills six Taliban with one bullet 31 Mar 2014 Gen Carter also said that the Army needed to do more to ensure that women did not leave the armed forces. “We have a career structure at the moment that is fundamentally a male career structure. It has in it a number of break points which sadly encourage women to leave, rather than encouraging them to stay,” he said. He said that the Army needed to reduce the “significant number of complaints about bullying, harassment and discrimination”. “What we have to do is have a career structure that genuinely provides women with the opportunity to pull right through to the top of the Army, so that we maximise the talent that is available in 51 % of our society,” he said. The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has previously said that he wants to end the army’s ban on women serving in frontline infantry roles. Mr Fallon has said that women could get combat roles by 2016. Gen Carter also said he was focused on ensuring that the Army was restored to its former readiness. "We bent ourselves significantly out of shape from 2007 onwards to be able to deal with the challenge we were confronted with in Helmand," he said. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11418406/Army-encourages-women-to-leave-says-Chief-of-the-General-Staff.html