How the Air Force can go from hair standards to norming

Three years ago, I wrote about changes to hair standards for female service members and the invisible work behind this policy change. Earlier this year, the Air Force updated Department of the Air Force (DAF) Instruction 36-2903 to include visual aids to help airmen understand and implement updated standards, both for women’s hairstyles and other areas of dress and appearance.

However, even three years after the updated policy came out, it appears women’s hair standards are still a topic of debate — drawing conversations among airmen, at command town halls and even behind closed doors in conversations with senior leaders. Why, years later, is this issue still controversial?

There are two reasons why updating women’s hair standards is a lingering conversation in the Air Force. First, updating standards in a massive institution with deeply embedded norms and complex bureaucracy is a difficult business. Institutions are structures that guide behavior among individuals in the systemand RULES are the rules (implicit or explicit) that shape behavior. Changing institutions is hard because change itself is hard—and changing an expansive bureaucratic institution like a branch of the military service doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, research from McKinsey & Co. finds that 70% of change programs in an organization fail and that there is an entire industry dedicated to change management precisely for this reason. But institutions are changing, as we see today DAF re-optimization for high power competition — So why is the Air Force’s hair policy so difficult?

Second and more specifically, women’s hair standards remain controversial because they involve changing social norms. Social norms create a shared understanding of what is acceptable in a group. It’s one thing to update the Air Force bureaucracy by changing instructions, but getting buy-in from group members is a different story and can be exhausting for both those making the changes and those approving the policies.

One way to change social norms is through modeling, but women are a minority in the Air Force and most senior Air Force leaders who are women do not keep their hair long, leading to a lack of prolific models to emulate Group acceptance of this updated standard faces other challenges: Because the updated hair standards are a visible marker of change applicable to a minority population, those not affected by the updated standard may feel resentful of the policy change, leading TO factionalism within the group and increased conflict above updated hair standards.

Old social norms run deep: The Air Force updated its hair policy to address the systemic medical concerns and operational needs of service members, but the change transformed decades-old image expectations for servicewomen. Given the context where women face harsher judgment for their appearance compared to men, a historic hair policy update coupled with such a readily visible change exposes women in the service to increased criticism – and even more so when members service is not up to standard.

The way to overcome these challenges is to remember, first and foremost, the point of standards: Military standards enable both interoperability and innovation. Aligning to a common standard for dress and appearance fosters a common identity among all Airmen, while updating these standards to promote inclusivity and promotes operational training presents the innovative nature of institutional change.

Providing another unifying function, the responsibility for maintaining standards is shared: individual members must understand, follow, and enforce the standard, even if the issue does not directly apply to them. Commanders must lead from the front and hold their people accountable to this mandate, creating a culture that includes respectful on-the-spot corrections for team members. Finally, senior leaders must continue to communicate the motivation behind the inclusive policy change: when service members can bring their authentic self to workthey are better equipped to serve. In today’s global context of conflict expansion and persistent recruitment challengesit is not a clear path for any motivated person to join us all volunteer force a worthy goal?

Finally, service members should demonstrate the same diligence they took in arguing for hair policy change by following the updated standard. Most senior leaders supported the hair policy change because updating outdated standards to optimize training and inclusion makes sense. Moving forward, the Air Force should continue to refine and modernize policies that are outdated so that service members can be the best versions of themselves in uniform to execute the mission most effectively.

In the grand scheme of military operations, hair policy standards may seem minor — but this change represents how the Air Force is evolving as a force and positioning itself for future threats. The American public trusts the military because of its high standards. The Air Force can strengthen that trust by rallying behind these high standards and the common identity of American Airmen that the standards promote.

Lt. Col. Kelly Atkinson, USAFR, is the admissions liaison officer at the US Air Force Academy and a political scientist at RAND. Lt. Col. Alea Nadeem, ANG, is the Commander of 150 Security Forces Squadron and a member of the Women’s Initiatives Team and Chair. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not reflect the position of the Department of the Air Force or the authors’ civilian employers.