LAY SUMMARY The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) continue to highlight the need to promote greater diversity and inclusion in its ranks. An increased representation of women in the Canadian military would enable greater capacity and capabilities to serve people, both domestically and abroad, and would contribute to a more diverse and inclusive military. To better understand how the CAF could increase the representation of women in the Canadian military, this article provides the key findings of three internal research studies on women’s perceptions of joining the military and women’s experiences as CAF members. These research studies examined the factors that influence women to join the military, the possible challenges impacting women’s decisions to join the military, and the improvements required for enabling a more effective military culture, including recruitment strategies that may help to increase the representation of women. Findings highlight specific factors and recommendations military leaders may consider to help promote greater capacity and capabilities through a more diverse and inclusive military.

Under current Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) policy, personnel at the rank of Private (Pte) are typically promoted to the rank of Corporal (Cpl) after 4 years of service (YOS). A proposed policy, if implemented, will have this requirement reduced to 3 YOS. This research was undertaken to estimate the cost of the proposed policy change. Using historical data, a workforce modelling approach was taken to forecast the population for the next 10 Fiscal Years (FYs) under the two different policies. The cost of the policy change was then calculated based on the difference in the numbers of personnel at each rank. Several factors were considered, including the current population, population promotion and attrition rates, and future recruiting numbers. The cost of the policy change was

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As a consequence of the closed, hierarchical nature of military organizations, good planning is key to ensuring that a military workforce will be well-situated to meet future demands. This chapter explores the role of data-driven decision support (referred to as analytics) in military workforce planning. As an applied research field, analytics aims to provide actionable insights and practical solutions to questions posed by decision-makers. Since data underlie all analytics, this chapter touches on the challenges of data-related issues such as accessibility, integration, and completeness, highlighting the importance of understanding the data and the context around it. Next, several areas where analytics are used to solve military workforce planning problems are discussed. This will give the reader a sense of the breadth of the domain, as well as the various approaches that can be employed by a practitioner.