Recent updates to Air Force dress and appearance standards were a win for Airmen who advocated for a broader set of professional hairstyles for women in uniform.
These changes, along with normalizing support to nursing mothers, identifying improperly fitting equipment, and demystifying seeking mental health assistance were among the central issues of Air Combat Command’s inaugural Sword Athena event last year. Sword Athena is designed to identify, tackle and present solutions to female and family-centric barriers to readiness using crowd-sourced topics and a Mission Area Working Group (MAWG) model.