Women are NATO: Interview with Lieutenant Colonel Diana Morais
Maria Luísa Moreira, Secretary General at WIIS Portugal, met LTC Diana Morais in Lisbon to learn more about her military career, her leading role at NATO HQ, and her aspirations for women in defence.
LTC Diana Morais is a senior adviser to the Minister of National Defence regarding gender equality and the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, Head of the Equality Office at the Portuguese Ministry of Defence, and Chair of the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives (NCGP).
1. LTC Diana Morais, you are an engineer by training who pursued a military career out of passion. How have opportunities for women in defence changed since you entered the Portuguese armed forces in 1996?
Throughout history, the right to fight and take part in war has traditionally been attributed exclusively to men. Although there are several examples of female warriors, female participation in warfare was always temporary. Most Western armed forces only began to admit women into their ranks from the 1970s onwards. In Portugal, female recruitment began even later, only from the end of the 1980s, when the Military Service Law of 1987 stated that women could join the armed forces as volunteers, but with their choices limited to some specialties. In 1996, when I joined the Military Academy, it was the first time in the Army that women were allowed to choose combat roles. This was a major shift.
Since then, the Portuguese armed forces have opened all specialties to women in all three services—navy, army, and air force—and the last restrictions were banned in 2008.
An interesting fact is that in the Portuguese Constitution, which dates back to 1976, it is written that the duty to defend one’s country applies to all Portuguese citizens, but only in 2010 were women granted the same rights and duties regarding military service, meaning it took 34 years for women to have the same opportunities.
So, a lot has changed since I joined in 1996. We now know that, by law, we have achieved formal equality, and women can do and be whatever they want in the armed forces.
But what I think is important to acknowledge is that formal equality doesn’t necessarily translate into de facto equality, and we need to make sure that we are making every effort to give women the same opportunities as we give men to reach their full potential within the armed forces. We need to identify and address all the remaining informal barriers to ensure this.
2. In recent decades we have seen widespread awareness campaigns and policymaking on the gender, security, and defence nexus. Do you think women are perhaps more encouraged to pursue a military career nowadays? What motivated you to join the Portuguese armed forces?
I have always wanted to be an engineer, and joining the armed forces was one of the possibilities I had to achieve this personal goal. I have relatives in the military, and I think this influenced me to apply.
Regarding your point about women being more encouraged to join the military, in a very pragmatic way (typical of an engineer) I would say that if we look at the data, we are not there yet.
Over the past 20 years, from 1999 to 2019, the average number of women in the Alliance’s armed forces has gone from 6% to 12%. At this rate, we will need a long time to get the critical mass necessary to bring about the much-needed cultural change that will enable the armed forces to be an organization that embraces equality. It is important to raise awareness on the gender-security nexus, but it is also very important to develop policies to increase women’s representation in the defence sector. Talking about the armed forces in particular, and while numbers are important, it is also key to understand where those women are within the organization. Unless we have women working in the core areas of the armed forces, which encompass all combat-related and all operational tasks, the chances of having more women deployed in missions and operations or more women at the highest decision-making level of the armed forces will remain low.
Decision-makers at the highest levels need to address this topic: they should move from words to deeds, and from scattered initiatives to a systemic policy that underpins the necessary changes. This is the only way to ensure coherent and sustainable results.
3. You were once deployed to UNIFIL, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon. The success of UN peacekeeping, like NATO operations, depends on the permeability of the military within civil society. How has this experience influenced your views on the need to build synergies between gender equality policy, the military, and civil society?
On the one hand, my experience as a company commander culminated with my deployment to Lebanon in December 2009, but it also represented the beginning of my interest in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, because I saw in practice the importance of integrating gender perspective in our daily work.
On this mission, besides being company commander, I was also a CIMIC (Civil-Military Cooperation) officer, and I had to liaise with the local authorities, mainly men. Without having heard anything about UNSCR 1325 and the WPS Agenda, I clearly realized that the fact of being a woman made my job easier, since I always felt welcomed in the villages or by the mayors.
My experience has shown that positive progress towards peace requires a more holistic and comprehensive approach that includes all those affected by conflict and that seeks to design military operations as a contribution to promoting and consolidating sustainable peace.
What the WPS Agenda has done is to challenge the military to adapt their response to the societies they seek to protect. The WPS Agenda has changed the way we plan and execute our operations, integrating a gender perspective, suiting them to the realities of societies in conflict and post-conflict, where women and girls are usually disproportionally affected. Adjusting our training, capabilities, and force composition to this reality does not make our missions less effective. It makes them more robust, because they are better tailored to achieve the main final goal, which is to maintain sustainable peace, not to perpetuate war.
Bearing this in mind, NATO has been implementing the WPS agenda for a long time now, with the first policy on WPS approved in 2007. In 2018, the Alliance revised its WPS policy and action plan, acknowledging that gender mainstreaming improves the effectiveness and contributes to a more modern, agile, ready, and responsive Alliance. Also, in 2021 the action plan was again revised and endorsed. Last June, at the Madrid Summit, for the first time in the history of NATO, Heads of State and Government endorsed a new Strategic Concept that recognizes the importance of WPS and the integration of gender perspective for NATO, reaffirms the Alliance’s commitment to advance a robust WPS agenda and to incorporate gender perspective across all its tasks.
4. Many will agree that coming from a small country can prove to be an obstacle in the pursuit of career goals. Can you explain how a Portuguese woman made it to NATO and what other Portuguese women who dream of such a career (military or civilian) can do to get there?
How did I do it? First of all, by dreaming about it. We have a poet in Portugal that has a quote that I personally love: “God wills, the person dreams, the work is born”.
My motto for life is connected to it, so when you want something, you need to go for it and do your best to succeed. If at the end you fail, at least you know you’ve tried. It’s not because something seems difficult or almost impossible to achieve that you should give up right at the beginning of the process.
There are two things I consider very important during this process: believing in yourself and in your capabilities and that you need to be empowered by other people (not necessarily women), or even better, sponsored.
I remember why I decided to run for the Deputy-Chair position of the NCGP back in 2017. I attended the NCGP annual conference for the first time in 2016 as a participant and was fascinated by it. All the expertise in the room, everything I learned, but most of all, all the passionate and committed people, mainly women, I met. At the end of the conference, an American female officer, who was a former Chair, came up to me and said, “You performed very well during the conference. I think you should run for the deputy chair position next year.” And that was it, those were the magic words I needed to hear to encourage me to run. Sure, a lot of work and will were required, but sometimes you just need that little push.
5. Last October you hosted the NCGP Annual Conference, which focused on moving from policy to practice when it comes to implementing the infamous “gender perspective.” Why does an organization like NATO need to integrate a gender lens in the first place?
While NATO has been implementing the WPS Agenda for a long time now, with the first policy on WPS approved in 2007, it is important to acknowledge that the Alliance’s initial engagement with gender dates back to 1961, when female senior officers met in Copenhagen and began organizing ad hoc conferences to discuss the status, organization, conditions, and career possibilities for women in the Alliance’s armed forces. The Military Committee formalized these stances with the official recognition of the Committee on Women in NATO Forces (CWINF) in 1976, one of the oldest committees at NATO and the predecessor of the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives (NCGP).
In a nutshell, the NCGP is an advisory body to the Military Committee (MC) on gender-related policies for the Alliance’s armed forces and promotes gender mainstreaming as a strategy to make women’s and men’s concerns and experiences integral to the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies, programmes, and military operations.
And why does NATO need to integrate a gender lens? The fundamental argument is necessity.
Meeting the complex demands of conflict requires diversity of skills, experiences, perspectives, and approaches, and we cannot afford to exclude 50% of the population, women, when recruiting or staffing our missions.
Secondly, differences in gender roles and stereotypes have an impact on everything we do, and our adversaries are capitalizing on our own misconceptions and biases. The operationalization of a gender perspective by our adversaries in their hybrid tactics, such as cyber activities and disinformation campaigns to instil fear, anger, confusion, and mistrust among populations, has been evident.
In addition, many terrorist groups are using gender and gender stereotypes as an advantage to enhance the effectiveness of their missions, such as using women as suicide bombers knowing that we are less likely to treat them as a threat.
And finally, how can we think about stabilization and reconstruction without the integration of gender perspective and without acknowledging what the different security needs of the local population are in post-conflict situations?
Integrating gender perspective is at the heart of what the military is doing, rather than a minor issue distracting us from the essence of our work, as some might think or suggest.
6. You have been Chair of the NCGP since 2021, which means that Portugal now holds this position for the first time in over four decades. How is the work of the NCGP dependent on member states’ individual contribution, commitment, and allyship?
NATO is what its member states want the Alliance to be, and the same thing goes for the NCGP.
I’ve been going through the committee’s archives and found the speaking notes of the first official CWINF Chair, Brigadier Eileen Nolan from the Royal Army Corps, and I quote:
Having taken over as Chairman, I represent, approximately 130,000 NATO service women and feel very strongly that it is important that we are recognized officially by NATO in order that all the Nations concerned will allow their senior service women the chance to meet together to discuss progress, problems and aspirations of their own Services and, above all, to consider every way in which women can make the fullest possible contribution, through Service in the Armed Forces of their countries, to NATO.[1]
In my opinion, this paragraph captures well how member states influence the Alliance’s work and how they contribute to a better NATO. This committee has been doing so for the past 47 years, and I hope it will continue to do so.
7. In the book NATO, gender and the military: women organizing from within, the authors note, “the NCGP may be NATO’s longest established committee, but just because it is old does not mean it cannot be nullified.” I wonder how its mandate has evolved and adjusted to the times, given so much has changed since the 1960s. And to what extent will the NCGP be worthy of investment in the next decade?
As I mentioned earlier, the CWINF, established in 1976 and the predecessor to the NCGP, is one of NATO’s oldest military committees.
Over time, the CWINF became an asset to NATO as it sought to integrate more women into the armed forces. The Committee has served as a space for member states to share best practices from their experiences in developing and advancing the recruitment and retention of women in the armed forces. Looking at the work of CWINF and the developments achieved, one realizes that these were based on institutional knowledge and connections made by the women who were part of it. However, at the same time, one realizes that the limited resources available restricted the scope of what the committee was able to do, as well as the objectives it could achieve.
Just 22 years after CWINF’s foundation in 1998, a permanent office was set up at NATO HQ, within IMS, to support the committee’s work. This represented a significant step towards the institutionalization of gender perspective as a key issue within the Alliance.
Although initially the CWINF was almost exclusively concerned with the situation and status of women in NATO armed forces, its members realized that its scope had to extend beyond issues concerning women in the military. So, in 2009 the CWINF changed its name to NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives (NCGP) to also support the integration of gender perspective in NATO's military missions and operations and the implementation of the WPS agenda.
Since then, the committee has supported the Military Committee and the member states in operationalizing the WPS agenda by integrating gender perspective, recognizing the disproportionate impact of armed conflict on women, men, girls, and boys, and providing a new way of thinking about the role of women, recognizing them not only as victims but also as relevant actors in international security.
Over the past 46 years, the NCGP has worked tirelessly to advance the integration of gender perspective in the Alliance and to facilitate NATO’s engagement with WPS. This work is carried out by individuals, women, and men, including national delegates, who come together to advance institutional change at NATO.
And change also comes from debate. The NCGP is a forum for us to meet and discuss, to inform each other of our experiences, our problems, and opportunities within our national armed forces. Information shared in such a way can have powerful effects. Working collectively increases the visibility of different gender communities within NATO, amplifying what would otherwise have been fragmented accounts at the national level.
NATO should continue to rely on the NCGP, on the one hand, to advise NATO leadership and member nations on the integration of gender perspective to enhance organizational effectiveness in support of Alliance objectives and priorities and, on the other hand, to make key contributions to advancing institutional change that goes beyond the Alliance’s military and political structures.
Maria Luísa Moreira (left) and LTC Diana Morais (right)
