(This article by Hope Hodge Seck originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Military Officer, a magazine available to all MOAA Premium and Life members. Learn more about the magazine here; learn more about joining MOAA here.)

 

Maria Donnelly was climbing the career success ladder in Washington, D.C. A researcher for the highly regarded Center for Strategic and International Studies, she co-authored reports on terrorism in Iraq and Syria that were cited by leading scholars. The director of the center’s International Security Program in 2017, Kathleen Hicks, would go on to become deputy secretary of defense — the most powerful woman in Pentagon history.

 

So when Donnelly’s husband, an Army officer, received change-of-station orders to Germany, she imagined she’d have no trouble finding work in her field at her new location.

 

“I was doing fieldwork in Turkey. I was going to the Syrian border. I was doing all these cool things, which I thought would be super relevant in a military context,” Donnelly said. “So I never thought it would be an issue.”

 

But instead of honing her warfare expertise at another think tank, Donnelly was about to receive an education of another kind. In the years that followed, she’d become intimately familiar with the maddening world of military spouse employment, with its hidden barriers and inequities.

 

And, as she had done in her previous roles, she’d embrace the fight.

 

Data collected by military advocacy organizations, and more recently the Government Accountability Office (GAO), reveals what a thorny problem military spouse employment remains, despite years of high-profile initiatives and incentives reaching as far as the White House.

 

A GAO report released earlier this year shows nearly 75,000 civilian military spouses are unemployed and actively seeking work. That’s despite acknowledgement from the Pentagon that military families, like their civilian counterparts, increasingly need two incomes to thrive amid rising costs of living.

 

While obstacles including misconceptions among employers and scarcity of reliable and affordable child care continue to challenge spouses seeking work, a growing conversation about how to level the playing field is giving advocates reason for optimism. They also hope that an increased understanding among military leaders that spouse employment supports servicemember readiness and retention will reframe the issue as a necessary component of military success — and not merely an afterthought.

 

[RELATED: Spouse Employment: Meaningful Change Will Require Real Commitment]

 

When Donnelly arrived in Stuttgart, Germany, a few months after her husband, she enthusiastically began applying for jobs. She knew her experience was competitive — more than 500 people, she said, applied for the position she vacated back in Washington, D.C. — and on top of that, she enjoyed military spouse hiring preference for roles within DoD. Despite all that, her job queries seemed to go nowhere.

 

“Crickets,” she said. “It felt like an eternity.”

 

Months later, Donnelly was able to land a role at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies by leveraging a strong reference from her prior job. The position required a round-trip commute of nearly six hours, but as she settled into her new military community, she realized she’d been more fortunate than most: She was one of the only spouses in her husband’s unit who was fully employed. And it wasn’t, she discovered, because there weren’t open jobs available to them.

 

A close friend of Donnelly’s in Germany, she said, was a doctor of physical therapy who had held a prestigious position with a U.S. sports team. This friend would apply for an open physical therapist role on the base where they both lived. Instead of offering her the job, though, the base would cancel the open posting and repost it later.

 

“That position was actually never filled the entire three years that we were there,” Donnelly said, adding that her friend never got a job in her field. Instead, Donnelly said, “she worked at the Christmas store on base [to pay] her student loans.”

 

[RELATED: Pentagon to Expand Paid Fellowship Program for Military Spouses]

 

Battling Hesitancy to Hire

The reasons behind this apparent hesitance to hire a military spouse are complicated. Some hiring managers, Donnelly said, rely on outdated stereotypes about spouses being merely “dependents” — undereducated or inexperienced. That’s despite recent data that shows 40% of working-age spouses are college graduates, more than the general population, and about 15% have an advanced degree.

 

Others, she said, are unwilling to go to the trouble and expense of hiring and training someone who will be pulling up stakes again in a few years for the next military move.

 

The reality that spouses often have no available backstop for child care when their spouses are deployed can also make hiring managers leery, she said.

 

Regarding the frequent moves in particular, Donnelly wonders why employers can’t instead view the cycling of talent as an advantage in the same way the military does. DoD spends millions annually on routine change-of-station moves so that the military can build troops’ skills, advance careers, and take advantage of leadership potential.

 

“I would argue that those same positive externalities apply to military spouses,” she said. “You cycle talent, you develop leaders, you teach people, you prevent corruption and graft by moving people into different offices. I think that’s actually incredibly beneficial.”

 

[RELATED: What the House NDAA Would Mean for Military Families]

 

When Donnelly and her family moved back to the U.S., she sought a position with the Department of the Army commensurate with her experience, only to experience the same dynamic her friend had: The job would get canceled and reopened in what seemed to her to be a naked attempt to keep her out of it. She filed a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging practices that went against military policy. And in 2023, she reached a settlement validating her suspicions.

 

But the toll, she said, was tremendous.

 

“It just was so mentally draining and frustrating,” Donnelly said. “It was honestly a mental health crisis. I lost my identity; I felt like I wasn’t contributing to our family.”

 

Jennifer Goodale, MOAA director of Government Relations for military family and survivor policy, knows these dynamics well. After serving honorably as a Marine Corps officer for seven years, she entered the civilian job market as a military spouse in 2009. Despite applying for numerous jobs within DoD, the positions she was able to land hardly reflected her skills and background: She spent a stint as a cashier at a home improvement store and another stretch as a sales associate at a bicycle shop.

 

A Known Problem

While it’s hard to find comprehensive data about the proportion of military spouses who are underemployed — that is, accepting work below their education or qualification level or working fewer hours than they’d prefer — the problem is widely acknowledged. Nearly all of the 17 military spouses who spoke with GAO investigators for the recent report expressed frustration with some aspect of underemployment. In Goodale’s experience, many spouses eventually abandon career aspirations and dedicate their talents to volunteer work instead, often contributing to the free-labor infrastructure the U.S. military has come to depend on to lead family readiness functions and community programming.

 

“You can’t get ahead if you’re always starting over,” she said. “And there’s a certain level of frustration that you get to where you just say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

 

[FROM GAO: Military Spouse Employment: Part-Time Workforce Characteristics and Perspectives]

 

That frustration has also, however, bred tightknit groups of spouse advocates committed to bringing about meaningful change. In her efforts, Donnelly has linked up with others, including Emmalee Gruesen, a Charlottesville, Va.-based Navy spouse and civilian Navy employee who advocates for other spouses through publishing articles, outreach to decision-makers, and even lobbying trips to Capitol Hill.

 

Gruesen, who considers her job a “unicorn” role in that it offers her the remote-work flexibility that so many spouses need, uses these advantages to push for broader change.

 

“So often,” she said, “we talk about [advocacy work] in the context of putting down a ladder to help others up.”

 

As the nation contends with an unprecedented military recruiting crisis, though, a new spotlight on living conditions for military families is bringing these barriers and frustrations, often previously overlooked, to the forefront of national attention.

 

In April, 10 months after forming the bipartisan 13-member panel to investigate military quality-of-life issues, the House Armed Services Committee’s Quality of Life Panel released a 48-page report containing nearly 30 recommendations for change. Of those, four are focused on supporting spouse employment.

 

In a press conference announcing the findings, chairman Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, cited the panel’s astonishing discovery: 21% of military spouses are unemployed and face unnecessary hurdles in finding employment.

 

[RELATED: More Spouse and Family News From MOAA]

 

The realization that spouse employment has bearing on the readiness and the health of the military as a whole is not news to advocates like Goodale and Donnelly. Nor is it news to the Pentagon.

 

As far back as 1990, the Army released a study on spouse employment finding structural and institutional barriers, including inadequate child care access, that held spouses back. It found even then that spouse employment rates lagged behind the civilian population and added there was “ample evidence” of underemployment.

 

The study cited a poignant statement that then-Army Chief of Sta" E.C. Meyer had made a decade earlier, in 1980: “We [the Army] recruit soldiers, but we retain families.”

 

Recommendations for Change

Among the Quality of Life Panel’s recommendations is a call to expand a DoD pilot program now entering its second year: the Military Spouse Career Accelerator Pilot. This three-year program matches interested military spouses with fellowships through voluntarily participating companies.

 

While it’s limited in size and scope and doesn’t address all the structural barriers that can keep spouses from meaningful employment, program manager Eddy Mentzer suggested it’s providing hard proof to employers that spouses are worth hiring and even competing for.

 

Of 450 spouses placed in fellowships with 250 companies during the program’s first year, Mentzer said, more than 85% received a job offer.

 

[RELATED: Strong Start for DoD’s New Military Spouse Employment Program]

 

Some, he said, were offered a job even before their 12-week fellowship kicked off — meaning employers were passing up DoD funding in order to bring quality hires into their organization right away. In its second year, he added, the pilot is poised to exceed all these metrics.

 

“This is one piece of the puzzle; it’s a tool in our arsenal to get after the unemployment and underemployment of military spouses,” Mentzer told Military Officer. “It proves to us that the talent pool is there.”

 

This year, he said, the program is expanding into skills-based fellowships catered to spouses who might lack education or certification prerequisites for a given position. The objective, Mentzer said, was to train and certify participants, helping them earn, for example, an insurance license, so they could then take positions with a participating company. So far, he said, 28 spouses are in training for these skills-based fellowships.

 

Meanwhile, new efforts are underway to dismantle or change policies that have hindered spouses from continuing career growth amid military moves.

 

Donnelly, Gruesen, and Goodale are part of a group of spouse advocates pushing for a standardized “leave without pay” policy for federally employed military spouses that would allow them to weather breaks in service due to military moves without losing accrued leave or Thrift Savings Plan benefits.

 

This policy, they say, would have no downside for employers, who wouldn’t have to pay spouses in leave status, but would reduce barriers to getting hired to another federal position at the next opportunity or duty station. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) have pursued the matter with requests to DoD.

 

[RELATED: DoD, State Department Agreement Helps Military Spouses Keep Federal Jobs]

 

A response to the senators from Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Ashish Vazirani at the end of February raises concerns that such a policy, if leave without pay status was maintained for an extended period, would negatively impact an employee’s eligibility for federal benefits and programs. To Donnelly, this reasoning fails to grasp the main issue.

 

“The alternative to leave without pay is not [another] job,” she said. “It’s being completely unemployed.”

 

Likewise, Donnelly is lobbying for changes to the federal rules governing military spouse hiring preference that can effectively require employers to hire a candidate they interview, thus — perversely — making them less willing to bring spouses in for a first assessment. Documents Donnelly requested through the Freedom of Information Act lent credence to her belief that the spouse preference system was not working as intended: They showed that, over the past four fiscal years dating to 2020, fewer than 1% of the spouses who applied with preference got job appointments.

 

“One of the things that we’ve really come up against when we advocate for this is people say, ‘Oh, but it’s a niche issue,’” Donnelly said. “But … it’s not a niche issue because not many people want to work for the federal government. It’s a niche issue because no one’s getting those jobs.”

 

[RELATED FROM MOAA: Advice for Spouses, Parents of Servicemembers, and Veterans Applying for a Federal Job]

 

The remote-work possibilities expanded by the COVID-19 pandemic also present new opportunities for spouses seeking federal work. That’s the thinking behind the Resilient Employment and Authorization Determination to Increase National Employment of Serving Spouses (READINESS) Act, introduced in both chambers of Congress in late 2023. The bill allows military spouses in federal jobs to request an individual determination as to whether they can go completely on a temporary basis; be reassigned in the same role to a commutable distance from a new duty station; or be transferred to a comparable job at the same pay grade.

 

While prior policies have encouraged employers to make considerations for spouses’ circumstances, it’s now time to “force the issue” with a law, Goodale said.

 

“Encouraging isn’t doing anything,” she said. “So let’s actually put some policies in place that force hiring managers to realistically look at spouses.”

 

[TAKE ACTON: Ask Your Lawmakers to Support the READINESS Act]

 

Child care accessibility, identified as a problem back in the Army’s 1990 analysis and raised as a key recommendation in the new Quality of Life Panel report, is also getting a closer look. Shaheen and Ernst have proposed new legislation that would create a pilot program of public-private partnerships with child care centers near bases to help fill military workforce shortages. Goodale said she’s impressed by the Air Force’s recent move to offer 100% free child care to Child Development Program employees for their first child in care and hopes the other services will follow suit.

 

Shining Fresh Light on the Problem

Better data about what hinders job-seeking spouses is also en route. The advocacy group Blue Star Families is wrapping up a longitudinal research study, set for publication in 2025, of 1,500 military spouses, that aims to better understand their employment journeys and the programs that best support them. A second project also underway will use interviews with 100 spouses to map their careers and the life events that force decision points away from or back into the work force. That project is also expected to be completed next year.

 

“Just understanding what those influences are will help us better understand what the barriers are to employment for spouses who do want to work outside the home,” said Jessica Strong, senior director of applied research at Blue Star Families. “And I think that can lead us toward solutions.”

 

New attention to how to create effective career pathways for military spouses is also shedding fresh light on possibilities. Lauren Hope, an Army spouse living near Fort Moore, Ga., has advocated for legislation that would extend work opportunity tax credits to spouses, an incentive for employers that acknowledge hiring barriers.

 

For herself, though, success has meant pivoting from her background as a professionally trained chef and launching a jewelry design company with pieces worn by then-second lady Karen Pence, among others. Beyond the high education level and diverse skill sets spouses bring to bear, she said, spouses share a determination that contributes to their success.

 

“We’re really stubborn,” she said. “And once we get tied in, we hit the ground running. And I know that’s because we have been forced to be so resourceful in the hard times.”

 

Hope Hodge Seck is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.