Why
Airlines Need More Women Pilots
The heroism of a Southwest captain shows up an unjustified gender imbalance.
Photographer: Keith
Holloway/National Transportation Safety Board via Getty Images
Tammie Jo Shults is commercial aviation's latest hero. So why aren't there more
pilots like her?
The Southwest Airlines Co. captain, praised for her cool handling of a
depressurization and emergency landing in Philadelphia Tuesday after the Boeing
Co. 737's engine blew apart mid-flight, is still an anomaly in the airline
industry.
While women make up roughly half of cabin crew, among pilots that ratio slides
to just 5.2 percent, according to the International Society of Women Airline
Pilots. There's a larger share of women in the Saudi workforce or Indian
boardrooms than in the cockpits of U.S. commercial planes.
Jobs for the Boys
Women make up more
than 7 percent of pilots at just a handful of airlines
Source:
International Society of Women Air Pilots, Gadfly calculations
What's most remarkable about that statistic is how persistent it's been. Amelia
Earhart, Bessie Coleman, Pancho Barnes and Jean Batten first took to the skies
almost a century ago. Chief executive officers Carolyn McCall and Jayne
Hrdlicka rose to the top of Easyjet Plc and Qantas Airways Ltd.'s Jetstar
carrier in, respectively, 2010 and 2012 -- but women still make up just 5.8
percent of Easyjet's pilots and 5 percent at Qantas.
The reasons typically cited for this disparity don't come close to excusing it.
Pilots certainly spend long hours away from home -- but that doesn't create the
same gender imbalance among cabin crew. Training as a pilot and maintaining a
commercial pilot's license can be expensive and time-consuming, typically
requiring 1,500 hours of flight time at the outset and one take-off and landing
every month after that -- but long-hours cultures don't hold women back to
nearly such an extent in other careers, such as finance and politics.
Seniority among pilots also tends to correspond to hours spent in the air, so
the hierarchy is likely to be dominated by older male employees long after
change starts at the bottom. Still, if senior men skew hiring and promotions
toward people who resemble them, that's an issue of workplace discrimination
and should be addressed as such.
This Flight Tonight
Women still make up
just 7 percent of certified pilots in the U.S., and 13 percent of student
pilots
Source: U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration
In an industry where Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. ditched a skirts-only rule for
women flight attendants just last month and Singapore Airlines Ltd. is still
touting the Mad Men-esque charms of the "Singapore Girl," it's
probably not all that surprising antediluvian attitudes persist.
As recently as 2010, Women in Aviation International's Australian president,
Tammy Augostin, recalls an instructor commenting that "If women were meant
to fly airplanes, the skies would be pink." She said: "Younger people
are certainly very supportive, but there is still that older mindset
there."
Now is as good an opportunity as there's been in years for change. With air
travel booming and 637,000 more pilots needed over the next two decades,
airlines already have a massive recruitment task ahead. Adding quotas and
funding to encourage more women to join flight schools -- as Qantas is doing
with a commitment to double intake over the coming decade -- should be seen as
part and parcel of that process.
Airlines also need to do far more to improve their family policies, which
typically reflect the priorities of the male-dominated unions who negotiate
them and which in some countries lack even basic provision for paid parental
leave.
This isn't just about altruism and fairness. The skill of flying a modern
commercial plane is in large part a matter of good decision-making under
stress. Multiple studies over the years have shown women have faster reaction
times than men and tend to take fewer risks, qualities that we would all like
to see in our pilots.
There are sound self-interested reasons for carriers to redress the imbalance
in the cockpit.
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