00:01 – Lauren Anderson
Welcome to the Steady State Sentinel. I’m Lauren Anderson. Before we introduce today’s guest, I’d like to take a moment to introduce someone very special to the Steady State Sentinel. I’m delighted to welcome our newest co-host, Bree Fram.
Bree served our nation for more than two decades, first in the United States Air Force and later as a founding member of the United States Space Force. Among her assignments was a deployment to Iraq. She served until late last year, retiring as a colonel.
One of my favorite things I learned about Bree is that a friend pushing her to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation at age nine convinced her that space should be her future. Unlike most nine-year-olds, she actually followed through, becoming an astronautical engineer before embarking on an extraordinary military career.
Bree’s also an author and a frequent keynote speaker, and she brings a thoughtful and distinctive military perspective to our team that complements the backgrounds the rest of us bring. Like Jim, John, Peter, and me, Bree continues to be guided by the oath she swore to support and defend the Constitution. Bree, we are so delighted that you joined the team. Welcome to the Steady State Sentinel.
01:30 – Bree Fram
Lauren, it is so exciting to have this be my first episode of The Steady State Sentinel. I couldn’t be more honored than to join you. But I will make one little rejoinder – you mentioned that I was thoughtful. Let’s leave that for the listeners to decide after we get through this, because when I start stepping on my words or making offhand remarks that are complete nonsense, I look forward to the feedback at the end on that.
It’s awesome to be part of this and to help both tell the stories that reinforce who we are as Americans and protect our constitutional rights, and then to learn from the guests that you and the others have already had on the show and those that we are going to have.
But before we get to our guest today, I did just want to ask you a little bit, because I know you’ve had a distinguished career and have probably ended up in some challenging situations over the years based on who you are, potentially feeling a little bit like an outsider in your environment. Is there one story that kind of sticks with you on that?
02:47 – Lauren Anderson
Wow, there’s so many stories. I’ll give you two really quick ones.
One while I was still at the FBI Academy – it was the night before we were due to shoot shotguns for the first time. They had all the women stay after. We were all in the gun cleaning room and we’re like, “What’s up? Why are the guys leaving and the women sticking around?” It soon became obvious because the firearms instructor – awkward, really nice human being, stumbling on his words – said, “Well, tomorrow we’re shooting the shotgun. If you have one of those like sports bra things, you might want to wear them, because if you have a other one, it’s metal and the metal might get pushed into you when you’re shooting the shotgun.” It came from a good place, but it was hilarious. I still think about it today.
Another fun one: when I was working counterintelligence many years ago, we were about to pitch a foreign intelligence officer from an unnamed country. We’re talking about it with all the executives and people from the CIA, and they start talking like I’m not in the room. “Well, what if he hits on her? What if he does this?” I said, “I’m actually here. I hear you. And if I haven’t figured out how to deal with a guy hitting on me at this point in life, I pretty much don’t belong in this job or anywhere else. So can we move past the point of Lauren being able to deal with a guy that hits on her and get to what we really need to talk about?”
Those are the two that I still find incredibly amusing all these decades later.
04:36 – Bree Fram
Well, we are definitely going to get to the things we need to talk about. But from your first anecdote, I took away that good intentions can often be based on outdated assumptions and perceptions of the world that just no longer are accurate – or that there are people who live in a different time than we actually inhabit today.
I think our guest today is going to be able to shed some light on some of those issues as well. I am really excited to welcome to the Steady State Sentinel, Jessica Ruttenber. Jessica – Lieutenant Colonel retired – overcame what she humorously calls her “vertical challenges” to become a senior pilot with over 3,000 flight hours in the United States Air Force.
Throughout her distinguished career, she championed inclusivity and dismantled barriers for women and minorities in the aviation field in the military. Her advocacy led to the Department of Defense’s first maternity flight suit, symbolizing inclusivity and addressing female pilots’ practical needs. She also drove change in aircraft design through human systems integration, challenging outdated policies that excluded 44% of women from aviation based only on height.
Her efforts reached Congress with the Equality for Military Mothers Amendment in the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, protecting over 200,000 Armed Forces members from discrimination due to pregnancy – a huge milestone in military equity. After retirement, she founded the nonprofit Level Up Aviation, empowering underserved communities to access aviation opportunities, continuing her mission to make the skies accessible to all.
Jessica, thanks for joining us on the Steady State Sentinel.
06:27 – Jessica Ruttenber
Thanks for having me, Bree.
06:29 – Bree Fram
It’s awesome to have you. I’ve known you for a while, but I want to reach back probably to before I got the chance to know you. I’m guessing there was a point where you realized that the world – particularly the military – might not have been designed with you in mind. When was that point in your career?
06:57 – Jessica Ruttenber
I think it can be traced back as early as childhood when I reflect – and I didn’t realize it until a few years ago. In my career, it was when I wanted to go to pilot training. I wasn’t tall enough. You have to be five foot four to be a pilot based on the medical standards. You could also be too tall – that’s usually a male problem.
They designed aircraft usually in the 1960s based on an anthropometric study – how you fit in the plane. It’s not just standing height – it’s sitting height. Can you reach the controls? Your thumb – can you hit a switch? All those things are considered. They took the average male height, about two standard deviations, and created a standard which excluded about 44% of women between the ages of 20 and 29. That’s just the average woman. Women of color are much more impacted – 74% of Black women cannot pass the sitting height.
If you sit in a cockpit, you don’t just stand. From your hip to your eyesight looking out over the cockpit, if you need to see a HUD when you fly, they’re disqualified because of that – an engineering barrier that has nothing to do with aptitude. The anthropometric database is based on one race and one gender, and as they allowed women into cockpits in the 70s, those barriers were baked in.
Women were flying in the WASPs in World War II, they were disbanded, then again in the 70s they started flying, and in the 90s they started flying fighter aircraft. When we look at why there aren’t Black women fighter pilots – it’s because we engineered them out.
For me going to pilot training, I had stretched really tall and barely passed five foot four. I wasn’t concerned because my eyes were so bad and I had a waiver. When they measured me and I failed my standing height and was removed from my all-male pilot training class, I thought it was for my eyes. But then they said, “No, it’s your height.” I thought maybe I was just slightly short – I didn’t figure out it was a female issue until like 18 years later.
09:52 – Bree Fram
There’s a lot there that you hit on, and to me the key one was “engineered out.” There was probably a point where we realized that for the military, for any national security institution, we had to engineer in institutional improvement. I think we saw this with women dating back all the way to DACOWITS – the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services – brought in in 1951 by George Marshall. It has been in the news again recently as this administration has attempted to push it out.
What did it look like to engineer in our ability to grow and succeed in the military for everyone? How did you turn this thing where you saw people being pushed out through nothing that had to do with their ability to accomplish the job, into a way to bring them in? And how did that make the military and the national security community better?
11:16 – Jessica Ruttenber
Wow. Great question, Bree. I didn’t see it at first. I think I was like most twenty-five-year-olds – I just wanted to fly a cool jet. I wanted to be one of the guys. I downplayed things happening to me – “I just didn’t fly hard enough,” “I could have done this or that.”
Then I started having babies. Slowly, even though I was flying the jet exactly the same way and still somehow the top flying hour person even though I was pregnant – I hid my pregnancy, got a waiver to fly, hit the ground running the minute I was medically qualified after the baby – my rankings were slowly going down. I was in denial until after the second child. Nothing had changed. I kept leaning in, going even harder.
When it started happening to my troops, I kept getting promoted despite the ranking going down. I just kept serving because I wanted to fly. But I found myself as a director of operations, in charge of large groups of women, and I started seeing what happened to me happen to them. Simple solutions – like wanting to fly pregnant. It’s safer to fly this plane than your car driving into work. We know this from data and statistics instead of bias, but flight docs were grounding them and denying them.
At the end of my career, I was like, “What can I do to change the system?” Every time I file a complaint or fix something, it’s whack-a-mole. People really do want to do the right thing if they get the right information. But getting them the right information is the first step. The second is changing the system. You’re always going to have that ding-dong – that one or two percent that makes all that noise.
It literally went from “I want to fly pregnant, people are trying to keep me from flying” to women in my unit being denied going to schools pregnant – schools that aren’t physically active, where you can get a waiver – to changing policy in the Pentagon. I accidentally leaned into it. It’s just called leadership.
14:31 – Lauren Anderson
I’d love to follow up with that. In the first years I was in the FBI, when women agents would get pregnant, they wouldn’t let them shoot, they’d stop them from doing things, and when they went on maternity leave, they took their gun and credentials away. I’m like, “What are you doing this for? We’re giving birth. We’re not dropping our brains out of our head when we’re getting pregnant.”
But more deeply, what is missed when you have women or other groups absent is that it makes the organization less effective. I’d love for you to talk about the value added that you and your colleagues brought. You had over 3,000 hours of flight time – extraordinary. Talk about the impact on mission effectiveness when you’re absent people who add value.
16:06 – Jessica Ruttenber
It’s a no-brainer – whether you’re talking about a specific group, a minority, a woman, anybody. This is our recruiting population. Why would you put self-imposed barriers on the amount of people you can access? I want the most qualified individual in the cockpit flying the most advanced aircraft. I want a Bree Fram leading the Space Force – someone with a degree, not the tallest person. I want the strongest person that can physically do a job. I just want the most qualified individual.
When it came to pregnancy, it seemed like a no-brainer. The biggest complaint I got – without people understanding a much larger conversation – was “what if you get pregnant?” My generation was “it’s cool as long as you don’t have babies.” Like don’t take maternity leave. Having a baby as a pilot and being told you’re grounded because of a 1960s chicken egg study – I looked it up – it was a recommendation by one individual who sourced his own study and made that policy.
We’re always in a pilot crisis. We throw $500,000 contracts at pilots to stay in. If you want to fly the majority of your pregnancy and free up a cockpit for someone to go downrange, you can take over training missions. That makes great business sense. You maintain your currencies, come right back in the cockpit. No one loses time. I flew all the way until they kicked me out, stayed in the sim, had the baby, and six weeks later was back in the cockpit.
That’s not for everybody. I had an uncomplicated pregnancy. But the majority of women in the Air Force that are flying are healthy individuals – screened, in shape, strong heart, strong eyes. If they have a good pregnancy and can fly, why wouldn’t you want that?
I calculated four hundred flyers per year were pregnant. If only half volunteered to fly half of their pregnancy, you would get years of pilots back. It just made great business sense. Before we even get into “should women be flying pregnant” – which is a different conversation about noise exposure, radiation – you can measure them. If you check, you’d see it was probably fine for ninety percent of the aircraft.
19:52 – Lauren Anderson
But you have guys that get injured too. Pregnancy’s not an injury, but it’s not like there’s only one group of people within the Air Force somehow not able to fully perform their mission.
20:12 – Jessica Ruttenber
I do have data. And what’s going to be real fun is that we pick the thing we’re biased against. We all do it – we’re all humans. I used to be really biased against my own gender because that was the way the guys were acting, so that’s the way I’m going to act. I was trying to assimilate until I knew better.
The data I found: we sit there and go, “Pregnancy is the most obvious reason why women shouldn’t be in these positions.” But if you pull the data and look at why women can’t deploy and men can’t deploy – men are more likely not to be able to deploy because of administrative burden – a flag on their record, medical codes, administrative codes. If they’re in trouble, Article 15s take a very long time to work out. Men are more likely at higher rates to be non-deployable than a woman not being deployable for pregnancy. Men are more likely not to be deployable because of administrative problems, and women sometimes are not deployable because they choose to have biological babies.
21:50 – Bree Fram
A lot of this gets down to readiness – how do we have a ready, capable force? Going back to DACOWITS in the 1950s, forward to 2008 when the Department of the Air Force first stood up the Women’s Initiative Team and then six other teams to address barriers to readiness – whether in retention, recruitment, military justice, or other issues – it was about gathering data and presenting a case on how to improve readiness.
What was it that made that work so effective? Just changing a regulation, you get 30 more man years of pilots by fixing something that shouldn’t have been a problem.
22:58 – Jessica Ruttenber
One thing – the mission. You work back from the mission and ask what makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense from the mission, do we need this requirement? I found that 90% of the initiatives we worked on directly contributed to enhancing the mission.
For instance, the height issue. It takes years to develop aircraft contracts. If you miss your window, you’re stuck for 30 or 40 years. One way we convinced the undersecretary of acquisition was with data. We said, “You have a standing height requirement for the people who sit in the back of the plane – the linguists who intercept transmissions, decode them, translate them, and send them back to decision makers. Why do they have to be five foot four? Why can’t they be five foot two? Their only requirement is to egress the aircraft.”
We researched it. We found they just cut and pasted the same requirements for pilots and put them in the back of the plane. At the same time, people who speak other languages – Chinese linguists – have really high academic aptitudes. It’s hard to teach if you weren’t raised with it. We had to lower the standard for language schools because we couldn’t get enough qualified individuals. Yet we had a lot of shorter-statured women who came from homes that spoke those languages fluently, but we just decided they couldn’t get a waiver.
With a stroke of a pen that day we changed the policy, accepted some risk, and lowered it an inch or two to get people in the door. Then we went and measured each aircraft for a more accurate standard that made sense.
25:37 – Bree Fram
Before we pivot to what’s happening right now, I want to ask one more question about data. So many decisions about readiness generation are data-driven. While there might be an emotional hook or anecdotes that get people to care, you don’t drive change without data. You’ve built your career on something called hidden barriers. When people are blind to a problem, what do you do to justify the collection of that data to shine a light on it?
26:33 – Jessica Ruttenber
You have to understand what the actual problem is. I would join different forums – enlisted, officer, different branches – and I wouldn’t comment. I’d just watch and see what the comments were. That gave me an idea of the zip code the problem was going to be in.
The first thing you do when you start peeling back that onion: are you looking at the right thing? For women in aircraft – why are our numbers in the single digits 50 years after we could fly? Are we just going to accept that women don’t want to be pilots, or are we going to look back and see what the data presents? A lot of these stories are half-truths. If you hear them and they keep coming back, there’s a part of truth in there. That’s where you start looking.
That’s where I found the 44% for women – it was buried in somebody’s ACSC paper. I always say keep going. If you stop with the first answer, you need to go farther. Ask 10 more questions. I watched the chief of staff of the Air Force ask about this and be assured the waiver process had fixed it. If he had asked one more question, he would have gotten to the 74%, or that Congress made us do this – we didn’t actually do it on our own.
The F-35 is all inclusive of women now, so it must be fixed. But if you read the cliff notes in the back, Dr. Watson’s Anthropometrics Lab basically states that Congress put the pressure on the Secretary of Defense – not because of their own accord.
Listen to those stories. There’s going to be a small amount of truth. Tie them together, look for the data, ask follow-up questions. Ask yourself what the real problem is. The pregnancy discrimination issue started with Jess Ruttenber really pissed off her ranking went down. She thought it was because she didn’t fly in a third trimester, so she tried to fix that policy. But the big issue was that she couldn’t file discrimination for herself or anybody else for grounding them without medical evidence because there was no protection. That’s ultimately how we ended up with a short pilot going from here to Congress.
30:20 – Bree Fram
You are speaking to my engineer’s heart with root cause analysis. We’re taught ask “why” seven times. Then you have probably found the problem. Not “why did this part fail?” – that little piece was broken. That’s not the issue. There’s something six more whys down the road that is really what caused the issue.
We can do that with so many issues across the military for readiness generation. Why aren’t we retaining certain groups? Why are we struggling to develop a skill set that’s going to work on a modern battlefield? Asking why is critically important. That’s why I think we got in so much trouble over the past couple years when these groups that asked why – whether that’s barrier analysis working groups, inspector generals, other parts of the government – were disbanded.
We need people willing to ask those questions. When some of this erasure started happening – when the WIT was disbanded and stories disappeared from people who brought valuable perspective – you created a series of “404 not found” highlighting what happened when you erased our history, including that of the Tuskegee Airmen and the WASPs. Their stories just disappeared because they were said to be based solely on diversity.
What is the impact of that kind of erasure on our future force and our ability to meet challenges on the twenty-first century battlefield?
32:23 – Jessica Ruttenber
It makes a huge impact. You should be threatened by your history. It’s called censorship when you try to change the narrative of what actually happened. The first thing I do when I research anything – an engineering design or a fight between my kids – is I need to know what happened before. What worked, what didn’t work? If we don’t learn from our lessons from the past, we will repeat them.
The height issue was tried to be addressed many times and kept falling flat because there wasn’t enough follow-through. That’s what led me to start writing articles. I realized it was dangerous to allow all the data to be in one spot – public affairs having all the stories. When somebody decides to bury all those stories, there goes the history. There goes that 44% I had to dig out of a college war paper.
If you were going to fly – I went into IT a little bit when I first retired, into the cloud space – you wouldn’t put all your data in one data center. You’d have it in multiple regions as a fail-safe. That’s the same thing with stories and censorship. When we give it to one institution – the U.S. government – it’s dangerous if they decide to change things. You see what happens to institutions that don’t fall in line with current administrative policies – their funding is threatened.
35:13 – Lauren Anderson
There’s even a greater harm – besides destroying history, you’re destroying value. By eliminating certain groups, you’re killing the mirror. All institutions need a mirror, a means of looking back on their own conduct. Can you imagine having an airline crash – the most investigated, meticulous work – and imagine them saying, “Somebody might find my mistake, so we’re not going to do it that way anymore, and we’re going to eliminate the NTSB”?
What’s going on now is markedly different because we are eliminating that ability to look at ourselves. With the elimination of 21 inspectors general, with the elimination of so many high-ranking officers in the Department of Defense and programs, we’re making that aperture much smaller – to look at ourselves and see if we’re doing things in the most effective way to execute the mission. That’s an even graver danger.
36:51 – Jessica Ruttenber
Truth isn’t afraid of transparency. If you’re not willing to face our past mistakes and just want to make it look like women were instantly welcomed – don’t ask, don’t tell – we don’t want to talk about those times. These are very bad things for our institution. It doesn’t make us look good, but we have to face them.
When you see a little kid looking at targeted ads on TV, they need to see representation. If you’re looking at Rangers and all the cool stuff in movies and you don’t see a single woman, what are kids playing sports thinking when they enter? Is that something they’re going to aspire to? We need to make sure all of the recruiting population is represented. Diversity makes us stronger – having enough different perspectives will make us stronger and more innovative.
38:23 – Lauren Anderson
That’s true across the government and the private sector. Under William Webster at the FBI, he undertook a concerted effort to make the FBI look more like the population of the United States. That made us much more effective because going out into communities, when they see people who look like the community, the level of trust starts at a higher level. Trust still has to be earned, but there’s a built-in belief that there can be two-way communication.
The military’s decision to start the women’s investigative teams in Afghanistan – well documented how valuable that was to the intelligence collected, understanding the culture, what was going on in villages and communities – making people safer and allowing better strategic and tactical plans.
39:44 – Jessica Ruttenber
People are concerned when we say we need to look like each other as a force. They assume we’re promoting based on quotas. We’re not – we’re just increasing the talent pool. I am never going to put somebody in a cockpit that isn’t 100% in my confidence able to do the job. It’s very quantitative – you either can or you cannot. Yet we get this notion that we didn’t earn it.
I reflected on where I met Bree. One day she was launching her first book, telling stories – Hidden Barriers tells other people’s stories, service members’ stories. It was at a bar down the street from my house. I was like, “Come on, y’all, we’re going to go meet Bree.” I talked to her wife because she was a celebrity everybody wanted to talk to. I said hi for half a second and thought, “I’ll send her an email later and maybe she’ll like want to hang out.”
41:37 – Bree Fram
I’m so glad we did get to know one another. It was a pleasure getting to understand your work and the effort you put in to reduce barriers, to make sure everyone could serve to their full potential – widening the aperture on who can serve because there is talent everywhere. Embracing that talent is how we generate a more ready, more capable force.
But I do want to look forward a little before we close. After retirement, you’ve done a lot to continue this work – with the Women in the Services Coalition, with Level Up – to make sure another generation can speak and fly. But there’s a silencing effect, a chilling effect. You’ve said you felt a duty to speak out on behalf of others that couldn’t. What is that duty for a veteran? How do we continue to speak out despite what we see happening to people like Senator Kelly, or people in uniform still doing it as we recently saw with Major Watson on the steps of the Capitol? What is it that veterans have – people who swore that oath to the Constitution – that duty to speak? What can we do to make sure our Constitution holds?
43:17 – Jessica Ruttenber
I don’t think you have to be a veteran to speak out, but I do think it helps considerably. There comes a point when you have to ask yourself what your values are and what you swore an oath to – and if those are the same thing.
With veterans, we get our freedom of speech back. We don’t completely lose it in the military, but it is heavily censored – and rightfully so for good reasons. But that can be weaponized, as we have seen in the last couple years.
The first two months after I retired, I was getting thirty, forty emails a day because I had made myself so visible. I used to hide behind a rock, then I realized I had to be the face because I was at the end of my career and willing to put it all on the line. That’s easy for me to say because I was financially in a situation where I could do that. Imagine you’re younger, you don’t have your guaranteed retirement, you’re a single-income family or a single parent – the risk isn’t just for yourself, it’s for your entire family.
I was in a good space, and I realized the greatest service I could ever do – other than my proud service in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the missions I flew – was to open the door wider for those coming behind me, regardless of what they look like and who they are, if they can get the job done.
I want people to understand – I’m not saying you look away when something is incredibly unethical or illegal. But there is a certain point that sometimes surviving is the ultimate rebellion when you’re not wanted – to make it to the top. Because I can voice my concern all day long, but until we have people that look like us and think like us at the top of the food chain, they’re the ones with the ability and authority to make these policy differences.
Sometimes we have to play along to get along to a point. I’m not going to say what that line is for you – it looks different for everybody. For me, my ego wanted to make O-6. I know I’m going to be rocking some boats. But when I look back at my career, even if I just got one more person in the door – and I know I’ve gotten considerably more than one – it was all worth it.
46:32 – Bree Fram
As you said, you have gotten a whole lot of people in the door. For so many people, it is about that legacy we leave. That really is the legacy of this country and what is being asked of all of us – that we leave it in a better place. We do the work that was started to form that more perfect union, to live up to our oaths to the Constitution. You have certainly done that both in uniform and across your career after your time in service ended.
Jess, thank you for joining us. It was a pleasure.
Lauren, thank you for bringing me into the Steady State family and welcoming me to this podcast. And to everyone listening, thanks for joining us for this episode of the Steady State Sentinel. We hope today’s conversation gave you something to think about, and we’d love to hear from you. What resonated with you? What questions did it raise? And what topics would you like to hear us explore in future episodes?
You can find us on Substack, YouTube, and across our social media platforms. Please like, subscribe, and share this episode. Your feedback matters and it helps shape our conversations.
Until next time, thanks for listening. I’m Bree Fram – Still Standing Watch.
This transcript includes AI generated material