There’s the discipline, the camaraderie, the skills, qualifications, the sense of honour. After a 37-year career in the Australian Navy, Jennifer Wittwer doesn’t hesitate to push her own young adult daughters towards a life in the military.

They would be joining a culture she has helped to shape, in her many roles at the forefront of the many changes that have swept through the navy over the past three decades. In fact, she’s forged an entirely new career as a humanitarian and advocate for women’s rights and empowerment, particularly in the defence sector.

These days, she’s a regular fixture on the global scene as a gender advisor for UN Women and various international bodies and foreign defence forces. Her strength is developing strategies to enhance women’s representation and participation in defence and security.

This life is nothing like what she envisaged when she joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1980, as a naive 19 year old.

Back then, Wittwer thought she was joining a modern institution. A career in the military had always been on the cards; her father, an air force pilot, had died in a plane crash before she was born, so the family history was always in the background.

“I always felt that I had this connection with the military,” she says.

“I felt that I would do well in a regimented kind of lifestyle, and the navy appealed to me because quite frankly, it had the nicest uniforms.”

It was also at the beginning of a new phase for the navy, in which women who signed up could stay on after they were married and had children.

“It was only the late 70s that that changed. I remember thinking it was a fairly modern navy,” she says.

But she soon discovered how little progress had been made - not that she had anything to compare it to.

“We were being paid the same as our male colleagues, that was not an issue, but we had very limited choices as to what roles we could have,” she says.

“We were limited to communications, logistics and administration. We couldn't drive ships, couldn't fly planes, couldn't be engineers - all those things that now, thankfully, women take for granted and accept as normal roles that you can undertake in the navy.”

They weren’t even allowed to wear trousers, back in 1980. Wittwer decided early on that she would complete 20 years of service, after which she would get a pension. In those early years, with no other goals or sense of what lay ahead, it was, she says, simply a matter of “gritting my teeth and bearing it”.

Since then, Wittwer’s entire career has been defined by change, by being at the forefront of seismic shifts in how the navy treats women in the workplace. But in the beginning, she had no sense of how much things would transform. She simply envisaged a land-based career in what was then the Women’s Royal Australian Navy.

But when the women’s navy became amalgamated with the general service, she was suddenly competing for positions and promotions with men. By the early 1990s, she was told she would have to go to sea - a possibility that had never entered her mind when she had signed up.

She was 34 when she took charge of her first ship, with no prior sea experience. She found herself seasick, and in charge of all ship logistics, including bringing aircraft on and off the ship, and monitoring practice nuclear and chemical attacks.

“These were all responsibilities that my male colleagues had developed, grown into. I was just thrust into it,” she says.

She was one of two women on board with 212 men. Not surprisingly, she dealt with harassment from her fellow officers.

“I dealt with those situations, I got them sorted, but it was uncomfortable, and it was unnecessary, and I felt it was an attack on my credibility as a logistics officer,” she says.

Well before that, as a more junior officer, like many of the women who joined the navy in the 1980s, she had also been subject to sexual harassment and abuse - events that were par for the course.

“I didn't do anything about it at the time, because I didn't think it would be taken seriously,” she says.

“There wasn't even a process to protect me. You've got to remember, this was the days when office walls were covered with pornographic pictures of women. And men would swear, make inappropriate jokes, all those things were going on all the time with women in the office.”

Nowadays, as in most modern Australian workplaces, there are processes in place to protect women from abuse and harassment. But it wasn’t until many years after the fact - in 2013 - that Wittwer had the opportunity to address what had happened to her, via the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce.

“[It] was then the organisation that was set up to actually take personal submission,” she says.

“I went through that process, including having that investigated by Victorian police. Unfortunately it didn't come to fruition because of the passage of time, the difficulty in identifying the perpetrator, and so on, but I was happy that I as an individual along with many others was given an opportunity through a process to have it recognised and taken into account, and provided with some form of compensation and the opportunity to have it properly investigated.”

But in the meantime, Wittwer was clocking up her qualifications, and ticking of her personal list of goals. She was already married by the time she went to sea, but put off having children until after she had completed her 12 months on the ship. By then, she had been in the navy about 15 years.

It was around this time that she moved away from logistics, and into what she calls the “gender space”, a space she has filled and expanded and amplified steadily ever since.

“I'd always had a passion for women, and I think that was born out of recognising that in the 80s and 90s I struggled,” she says.

“Not struggled in terms of my own personal achievements, but just struggled against the system to amplify women's participation, women's roles, the importance of having women in the organisation, and not just a bunch of blokes.

"And of course, having been a victim of the sexual harassment and abuse that was going on during that time, I was very passionate about protecting women's rights and enhancing their rights in our organisation.”

In the years leading up to the defence force review by former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick in 2011-12, Wittwer was busy laying the groundwork to what would become a serious rethink of women’s opportunities and participation in the navy. She was appointed to oversee a reform of the navy’s values and culture, and specifically how to get more women to join.

She eventually became the navy’s Women’s Strategic Advisor, to advise senior leaders on women’s participation and representation.

“I was part of that whole cultural reform bubble, which was a really exciting time,” she says.

“I think for the first time in my naval career, which by this time was 28 years or something, we were starting to see positive change. To me the positive change was more about the way people treated each other, not necessarily about women getting something more than men. But it has been about recognising that women add value to the organisation, and just treating everyone that you work with with respect in the workplace. Nothing more, nothing less.”

By the time the government-initiated Broderick review came out, Wittwer was ready to move into another space - Women, Peace and Security, a resolution of UN Women passed in 2000. Wittwer was sent to Afghanistan in 2013 - her first overseas deployment, at the age of 50, as a gender advisor to NATO operations.

“It moved me into a different area, but still touched on women's participation and representation, in a much broader way,” she says.

“I had to leave behind my passion for navy women, and thinking now a bit more strategically about how we contribute women to peace and security operations, and to do that, how do we enhance their participation and representation in national institutions.”

Earlier this year, Wittwer left the navy after 37 years, and set up her own consulting firm, Steorra Consulting, helping organisations to increase women’s participation and representation in the workplace - mainly in overseas armed forces, working with UN Women.

She has twice been named in The Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence, and is a finalist in this year’s Canberra Women in Business Awards.

But her two daughters, aged 21 and 18, still show no signs of wanting to follow in their mother’s footsteps, a fact that makes her wistful.

“We've got a lot of very smart, very intelligent women in our organisation, and I think my two daughters would fit in very well,” she says.

But again, this is the end product of her years of trailblazing, of that original determination to just “grit my teeth and bear it”.

“People often say to young people, ‘You can't be what you can't see’, and we argue that we need to have role models, for young girls to see that there are women pilots, engineers, and all these other opportunities that exist,” she says.

“On the other hand, I would also say you can be what you can't see, because as the world evolves, and as workplaces evolve, there's always going to be firsts.”