Maximizing female retention in the Navy

Abstract

This study estimates Navy female officer retention probabilities and identifies individual-level attitudes and perceptions for particular designator categories with female representation in order to better understand the effects of occupation assignment and retention policies. The design of this study included a multivariate logistical regression model and a survey. The data included 368,667 annual Navy officer observations from fiscal years 2003'20012 collected from DMDC for regression analysis and 877 active duty male and female Navy officers who participated in the survey portion of this study. Retention in this study is defined as five years and six months from the officers commissioning date. Through our multivariate logistical regression, our results indicate that there is a point at which the probability of female officers remaining on active duty service increases with the proportion of women in certain designator categories. Furthermore, our survey findings confirm that for some occupations, the perception of women with regards to factors such as career plateau and turnover intention are affected by the proportion of women within their occupational grouping.