I recently came across a funding call that, while very welcome in its support for service women, gave me pause. It invited proposals that “address the unique challenges that service women face”, very generously offering grants up to £100,000 for projects that provide “education and information to help maximise their health and wellbeing”. In other areas of the funding call ‘specific needs’ is used. But as someone currently undertaking a PhD and utilising Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) (Bacchi, 2009) approach, I found the language in parts of the call thought-provoking and here I share my reflections.
For those unfamiliar, Carol Bacchi’s WPR approach is a critical policy analysis tool that invites us to look beyond surface-level solutions and instead examine how problems are constructed within policy discourse. Grounded in feminist theory, WPR challenges the idea that policies are neutral; it reveals how they shape what counts as legitimate knowledge and whose interests are prioritised. By interrogating the assumptions embedded in policy language, WPR asks: What is taken for granted? What remains unsaid? What are the implications of framing the problem in this particular way?
The call is on the surface a welcome commitment given that women in the armed forces can experience preventable health disparities and adverse experiences within military service. Read through a feminist lens—analysing with a consideration of gender dynamics, especially power structures and inequalities—the phrase “unique challenges” raises uncomfortable and important questions. Whose challenges are these and why are they framed as unique? What assumptions about the military, the body and health are being subtly reinforced in this language? I contemplated how the language used in the call may shape our understanding of service women’s experiences—and what that might mean for the kinds of research and interventions that are ultimately supported.
An alternative question: Why do these ‘challenges’ exist at all?
By describing service women’s health concerns as unique, does the funding call unintentionally reaffirm a deeply entrenched idea: that women are somehow exceptions to military norms. This wording treats women’s bodies and experiences as divergences from a presumed (masculine) standard of soldiering, a standard into which they must be accommodated rather than fully integrated. The result? Even well-meaning efforts to support women can end up othering them.
A question I asked myself while reading the extract was, does framing challenges as women’s reinforce the idea that the problem lies in their physiology, their biology or their perceived difference — not in the structures, systems or cultures that have not fully adapted to an inclusive force?
An alternative question: Why do these ‘challenges’ exist at all?
Instead of asking what challenges service women face, a more transformative approach could ask, why do these challenges exist in the first place? What institutional norms, practices and values are producing disparities in health and wellbeing? Are services provided to service women seen as exceptional or are they fully integrated into military service so that all bodies are routinely accepted for service.
The feminist response here isn’t to reject efforts to support service women, but to shift the focus from accommodation to transformation, from individual resilience to institutional accountability.
From downstream to upstream: Towards structural change
Health promotion and wellbeing interventions are essential but they must be coupled with efforts to challenge the upstream causes of the challenges. Supporting service women shouldn’t mean simply responding to their “unique” needs — it should mean rethinking why those needs go unmet in the first place. Taking a WPR approach to the proposal, responding to ‘unique challenges’ with information and education assumes that the problem arises through lack of information and education. As Carol Bacchi explains, “what one proposes to do about something reveals what one thinks is problematic (needs to change).” In this case, the challenges faced by service women are framed as a result of insufficient training and education—placing the onus on them. The proposed solution, then, is to educate and inform the service women themselves, rather than addressing broader structural or institutional issues.
While tailored advice and education for service women is helpful and adds value, questioning the language in this excerpt leads me to think that truly supporting their health and wellbeing requires going beyond these measures to address the deeper, structural issues at play. We need a shift in understanding whose bodies and whose experiences belong in the military. Instead of framing service women as deviations from a masculine norm requiring correction or supplementation, could we be asking how military structures, policies and cultures can evolve so that service women are not “unique,” but simply and fully included. Until then, efforts to support them, however well-intentioned, will always be treating the symptoms not the cause.
Kirsten Morris, PhD student at the CMWR