Closing the Security Industry’s Gender Equity Gap

In short, the gap between activity and impact warrants honest examination rather than another round of acknowledgements. 

The problem is rarely intent. The issue is that many approaches have been surface-level: groups without clear mandates, commitments without accountability and communications that announce progress without demonstrating it.

Reading what the sector produces publicly on gender equity, a pattern emerges. There are statements, references to events and, occasionally, a quote from a senior leader. What’s largely absent is specificity: what an initiative is designed to achieve, how success will be measured and what has actually changed as a result.

The people these initiatives claim to address can see the difference.

Barriers that persist

Women in security face a set of interconnected challenges that have not shifted significantly in years. Underrepresentation compounds itself. When women cannot see female leaders in operational and strategic roles, the industry sends a clear signal about who belongs there.

Progression pathways that exist in theory remain inaccessible in practice, shaped by evaluation processes that carry conscious and unconscious bias and by working structures that simply haven’t kept pace with how people’s lives actually work.

Shift patterns are a concrete example. Security has historically operated on 12-hour rotating shifts. For anyone carrying primary caring responsibilities, that structure makes a security career genuinely difficult to sustain. The sector knows this and has been slow to respond.

Language shapes perception in ways that accumulate over time. The Security Industry Authority’s (SIA) standard Front-of-House licence is still formally called a door supervisor licence. The sector still uses ‘manned guarding’ as standard terminology. These are not minor stylistic choices. They inform who applies for security roles, and who concludes the industry is not for them, before anyone has had any real reason to think otherwise.

There’s also a significant talent pool that the sector is failing to reach. The role of a modern security professional has broadened considerably to include de-escalation, customer engagement, situational awareness and risk assessment. The physical intervention model that shaped the industry’s public image is a diminishing part of the picture. The work has changed: the narrative about who security is for, though, has not followed suit.

What meaningful progress requires

Changing this status quo requires effort across several fronts simultaneously, not to mention the willingness to treat structural barriers as structural problems rather than interpersonal ones.

Recruitment processes need to be examined for the points at which they filter out candidates for reasons unrelated to capability. That means reviewing job descriptions for gendered language, structuring interview panels to reduce individual bias and being honest about where informal networks still shape who’s considered for roles before a formal process begins.

Development pathways need to be real. Women in security need access to mentoring from people who understand the specific challenges they face and structured programmes rather than informal arrangements that depend on individual goodwill. Where the pool of female mentors at senior levels is limited, group-based models can extend capacity in ways that one-to-one programmes cannot scale.

Flexibility needs to be treated as an operational question. If working structures prevent the sector from accessing a significant share of the available talent pool then that’s a commercial problem with practical solutions. Other safety-critical sectors have demonstrated that operational roles can accommodate flexible working. Security can do the same. Those organisations that move earliest on this will have a genuine advantage in both recruitment and retention.

Visibility matters more than it’s often given credit for. When women in leadership are seen, when their career paths are shared and their voices given platforms, it changes what feels possible for the women coming behind them. Role models are part of the recruitment pipeline. That’s practical, not symbolic.

The industry’s responsibility

Much of what needs to change requires collective action, not isolated effort. Individual organisations can seek to improve their own practices, and so they should, but several of the most significant shifts – particularly around language, standards and how the industry presents itself to the world – require the bodies with genuine influence to act.

The SIA has an opportunity to signal something important through the language it uses in its licensing framework. Industry bodies working with Government and regulators on standards and professionalism have an opportunity to make gender equity a structural concern, embedded in how the sector is governed, rather than something addressed in parallel through voluntary initiatives.

The security sector has a talent shortage and part of the answer resides in plain sight. The organisations and bodies that treat this as a strategic priority will look markedly different in ten years’ time. Those who continue to treat it as a communications exercise will still be announcing their commitment to change.

The women already in this industry, and the women who have not yet considered it, deserve better than that.

Hannah Harrop is Head of Human Resources for Security (UK and Ireland) at OCS (www.ocs.com/uk)