Britain fails to promote female spies

Britain's secret services are recruiting more women as agents than ever before but are failing to promote them to senior ranks, according to a rare report by MPs.

Boosting the number of minorities and women in MI5, MI6 and GCHQ has been a priority for spymasters for several years as they increasingly see male-dominated workforces as a national security problem. However the UK still lags behind peers like the US and Israel when it comes to promoting women spooks.

"If you look like me, then you can't operate in the operational areas that we need to operate in," MI5's former chief, Jonathan Evans - a white, privately-educated classicist - told parliamentarians in 2012.

Until now, the debate has had relatively little public attention. Perceptions of women's power in the secret services may have been skewed by the fact that both Mr Evan's predecessors as directors-general of MI5 were women, and the head of MI6 in the most recent James Bond films was played by Judi Dench.

The report released on Thursday detailed recruitment practices for the first time. In total, 37 per cent of staff working for the three intelligence agencies are women, compared with 53 per cent of the civil service.

MI5, the domestic intelligence service, has the best record: of its 3,926 staff in August 2014, 1,575 - two in five - of its staff are female. This is a marked improvement on previous years; in 2011, just one-in-six new recruits was a woman. In senior positions, however, the service is still dominated by men: only a quarter - 13 - are women.

At MI6, officially known as SIS, 905 of its 1,525 staff are women. Although nearly half of all new recruits last year were female - compared with just a quarter in 2011 - like MI5, few seem to rise to the top. Just 15 per cent of senior SIS staff are women.

GCHQ, the Cheltenham-based electronic eavesdropping agency - the biggest of the three spy organisations, employing 5,683 staff - performs most poorly. Just 35 per cent of its staff are women, and of those just 8 are in senior jobs. Less than one-in-three new recruits are female.

The figures were drawn together by the Intelligence and Security Committee of parliament in an investigation led by Labour MP and former cabinet minister Hazel Blears.

"If all intelligence professionals are cut from the same cloth - sharing similar backgrounds and similar characteristics - then they are likely to share unacknowledged biases which will circumscribe both the definition of problems and the search for solutions," said Ms Blears. She added that diversity was directly linked to national security.

The ISC's investigation also involved dozens of interviews with female staff of the agencies that sought to identify ways of recruiting - and crucially, keeping - more female staff.

While some of the problems facing the agencies will be familiar to any workplace diversity effort - such as the absence of any nurseries at Vauxhall Cross, MI6's head quarters or the "Doughnut", GCHQ's Cheltenham station - others are more peculiar to spying.

Women on maternity leave, for example, can find themselves completely shut off from their previous lives as spooks: casual access to workplaces is impossible as clearances and passes are revoked and contact with colleagues is discouraged.

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