Europe’s defence spending is booming, female representation is falling
European defence budgets reached $563 billion in 2025, part of a sustained surge that has seen the continent's share of global military spending climb from 17% to over 21% since 2022. Employment in the sector hit its highest level ever recorded. An entire industrial base is being rebuilt at remarkable speed.
This is a genuinely historic moment. It is also, if the data is anything to go by, a historic opportunity to get gender parity in the modern defence workforce catastrophically wrong, and to lock-in that potential failure for a generation.
I say this not to be a cynic, but because, while the industry is growing faster than at any point since the Cold War, female representation in the UK private defence sector has actually fallen. The proportion of women working in the sector's private companies is now below 29%, down from the previous year, and moving in the wrong direction against an already unambitious target of 30% by 2030. Meanwhile, women account for just 11.9% of the UK Regular Forces, with female intake for the year to March 2025 running at only 10.5%. The industry is adding jobs at historic pace. Women are not filling them.
Now, perhaps the good news is that this is not a pipeline problem, our current workforce on the whole in Europe includes more women than ever before. Rather, this is a pattern problem. And the difference matters, because the solutions need to be seen through a new lens.
Here's what I mean. When hiring happens fast, really fast, at the pace European defence is currently moving, organisations default to what they know. They recruit from existing networks. They promote those who have always been promoted. They copy and paste job descriptions that have always attracted a particular kind of candidate. There is no malice in this. There is simply momentum. And momentum, in an industry that has always skewed heavily male, will produce a workforce that skews heavily male. Unless someone deliberately interrupts it.
The stakes here are higher than they might appear. Defence is not like other industries. The decisions being made right now, about who gets hired into technical roles, who gets promoted into leadership, who shapes the procurement frameworks and strategic priorities of the next decade, will define not just what our companies look like, but how effective they are.
The World Economic Forum estimates it will take 123 years to close the global gender gap at the current rate. In defence specifically, where workforce cultures calcify quickly and security clearances create long employment tenures, the window to get this right is narrower still.
I have spent decades in this industry making the case for inclusion based on equal merit and the promotion of talent, regardless of gender — at first from inside large primes, now as a founder building the kind of company I always wanted to work for. What I watch in the current rearmament surge makes me uneasy. Not because the urgency is not real. It is. But because urgency is historically the enemy of parity. It gives organisations permission to move fast and fix culture later. Later, in my experience, never comes.
The biggest hiring surge the European defence industry has ever seen is happening right now. Let’s disrupt this pattern, as a once-in-a-generation chance to reshape who the industry is built for. That version will produce a more capable, more resilient, more innovative industry. The research on diverse teams is unambiguous, and it is particularly compelling in a sector where the quality of decisions carries national security consequences.
Getting there requires choices being made right now, in hiring briefs, in promotion panels, in how contracts are structured and who gets to bid for them. The money is on the table. The workforce is being built. The only question is who it gets built for.
Naomi Hulme is Co-Founder and CEO of Skyral Defence a modelling and simulation software company working across defence and intergovernmental partnerships.
