Women in Aviation: The Challenge of Inspiration vs Forced Diversity

Let’s cut to the chase: it isn’t a secret that most pilots in the world today are men. Data from ICAO and EASA shows that only about 5% of pilots are women. Even in this day and age, increasing the amount of women in aviation continues to be a challenge.

Meanwhile, women make up about 44% of medical doctors, 12% of astronauts, 30% of scientists and 20% of engineers. So what’s really going on? How does it affect the industry, and how can we inspire more women to pursue a career as a pilot?

Is simply setting gender-based hiring targets really the solution to this imbalance, and what are the negative effects of this? We take a deep dive! 

Please keep in mind that we use various generalisations in this article, by looking at a multitude of different sources and statistics. This does not mean there are no exceptions to the norm, or that specific examples that prove the opposite don’t exist.

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Why are There so Few Women in Aviation?

There are a lot of different reasons why the amount of female pilots is so low worldwide. Let’s take a look at the main ones that have been found by various studies over the years:

Historical Gender Stereotypes

In general, society still thinks of a man in a uniform when you ask them ‘what is a pilot’? In fact, a recent survey in the UK showed that 51% of the general public trust a female pilot less than a male pilot.

Things like this can create a viscious cycle where societal perspectives influence women on whether or not to enter the industry. This then results in less women on the flight deck, which fuels the perception even more.

The problem of stereotypes goes back to the very start of the industry. In the early days of aviation, it was seen as a high risk profession. Qualities such as courage, risk-taking, and strength were all assumed requirements for the job. This attracted a lot more men than women to the profession.

On top of this, at the time aviation became a mainstream profession, traditional gender roles and norms were much more ingrained than they are now.

The feedback loop of ‘less women in aviation’ -> ‘cultural barriers’ -> ‘less women in aviation’ can be hard to break, and is heavily researched nowadays. We’ll come back to this later!

Lack of Role Models

Having a role model, especially for young people, can be a big influence on career choice and personal development. The lack of role models in our industry will impact what young girls decide to pursue. Seeing really helps with believing. It’s no different for most boys: role models can inspire us to do or not do certain things in life.

Again, it’s a feedback loop. Less women on the flight deck -> less girls wanting to be pilots -> less women on the flight deck.

The first female airline pilot, Bonnie Tiburzi, was hired in 1973 for United Airlines, among over 200 male pilots. When you consider that the first few airlines established themselves around the 1920’s, it means that it took over 50 years for a woman to enter a commercial flight deck!

The Impact of Wanting and Having Kids

Even in today’s society, where gender roles are less defined, having children is often still more of a commitment for women than for men.

EASA States:

Women, in general, tend to put a bigger emphasis on making sure they have a work-life balance that suits their family life. With women still often taking on more care-giver responsibilities, this can have an impact on time and money.

The journey from cadet to professional pilot leaves very little time to focus on other things, as many of you will know. It often requires moving countries, getting into huge amounts of debt, and little time to socialise, and can take years for those not doing an integrated course.

All of these together will impact someone’s prospects to have and look after children in a big way. Not to mention the incompatibility of all of this during pregnancy and the first few months of a newborn.

Women’s Career Preferences

Even though men and women’s lives are a lot more similar now than in the early days of aviation, there are still differences in what each gender tends to optimise for.

The most influential difference in why women are not seen in professions that men seem to dominate in, is risk aversion.

This 2017 study showed that men have a higher tendency than women to seek sensation and risk. This was highlighted as one of the main contributing factors to how men and women are split amongst different industries.

Despite the amount of progress we’ve made in reducing stereotypes and encouraging individual choice, we still see less women choosing high risk professions and career paths.

Becoming and being a pilot comes with a lot of different risks. From having to move across the world for flight training, getting in huge amounts of debt, and often having to jump into the unknown when it comes to job opportunities. Aviation itself is just a higher risk industry than many others. Even with our huge improvements in safety over the years, accidents and fatalities are still frequent across the globe.

Cultural Barriers

Then there’s culture itself. Personally, we have had very few negative experiences with culture in aviation. In fact, compared with other industries experienced before aviation, we are proud to say that the aviation organisations we have been part of have been our most inclusive places of work.

Unfortunately some aviation organisations still have atmospheres that radiate signs of being a ‘boy’s club’. Worse than this, are reports of sexual harassment.

In the FAA’s ‘Breaking Barriers for Women in Aviation’, a result of one of their survey’s states that 71% of women reported experiencing sexual harrassment in the workplace or aviation setting.

Maybe naively, this figure was a shock to us and shows that we still have a lot further to go in this area.

While humour, banter, and teasing can of course have a place in a professional environment, it’s a fine line to walk on. Inappropriate jokes may be harmless fun to some people, but it can have a very different effect on others.

Financial Barriers

Then there’s the elephant in the room: the huge amounts of money it takes to become a pilot.

Now you might say: why would that impact women more than men?

Well, there are multiple reasons. One of the biggest ones is, again, the difference in risk aversion.

It’s a big risk to approach a bank, ask “can I borrow £100,000?”, pay 5% or more in interest as soon as your flight training starts, with no guarantees of a job.

Return on investment for someone who is highly risk averse is at a much higher rate than someone who is not very risk averse at all. So while for person A it’s a no brainer to approach the bank, person B might think you’re crazy.

What are the Benefits of Diversity in General?

There are some people who read the word diversity and start rolling their eyes. This is partly because it has become a bit of an overused buzzword. However, below the surface-level company marketing plans, there are some real benefits of welcoming a diverse workforce.

It’s not just about gender, age or race either. Something called cognitive diversity is the differences in perspective or information processing styles between different people.

This is the natural result of coming from a different part of the world, with a different way of looking at things, or from being a different gender. This brings a lot of different benefits, proven by Harvard Research and many other studies across the globe.

So, let’s try and detach the word diversity from politics, and look at the proven benefits of it for safety critical environments like aviation.

Better Problem Solving

Diversity’s main impact on problem solving comes mainly from one factor: it reduces group think.

Group Think: A strong concurrence-seeking tendency that interferes with effective group decision making. Symptoms include apparent unanimity, illusions of invulnerability and moral correctness, biased perceptions of the outgroup, interpersonal pressure, self-censorship, and non-optimal decision-making strategies.

Homogenous groups are more susceptible to group think. So whilst having pilots on the flight deck who share the same qualities can be a benefit in some areas, this is the downside of it.

Having more diversity on the flight deck means having pilots from different backgrounds, that have different life experiences.

When shit hits the fan, having a diverse team can be really helpful as each pilot might see the problem in a slightly different way.

When everyone shares their ideas and perspectives, it increases the chances of finding the best solution to the problem. Different viewpoints bring in different ideas and approaches.

Improved Risk Management

Spotting what the main risks are, is a huge part of being a pilot. Threat and Error Management incorporates this trait, and without it we would not be where we are today.

Cognitive diversity allows for different people in the same team to see different threats in the same situation. This is a huge benefit to operations on the flight deck.

Threats are everywhere, but it’s up to us to spot them in order to actively address them.

More Adaptable Teams

Because a diverse team has more members with different experiences and perspectives, dealing with non-normal can be easier than for a homogenous team.

When you have a team of people with the exact same personality profile, life experience, and background in basic training, they will probably be super efficient at doing one particular thing.

The problem arises when that particular thing is outside the scope of those perspectives and backgrounds. Having people who have reached the exact same standards, but from a completely different origin, makes finding solutions a lot more efficient as a team.

Enhanced Communication

Diversity generally makes communication better. If your team includes people who might not have English as their native language and have a different view of the world, you will need to be more clear and concise when you speak.

This highlights the importance of SOP’s, verifying your message has been understood by the receiver, and overall awareness of how you come across.

When you’re in a safety critical environment where multiple cultures come together, people prioritise effective communication more than in an environment where communication is perceived to never be an issue in the first place. The latter can lead to complacency, and a breakdown in communication that is not detected.

Are Hiring Targets and Forced Diversity Real Solutions?

While the benefits of having more women on the flight deck share a lot with the benefits of diversity, forcing it can have its costs.

Not Prioritising Competency

The root problem is unfortunately still there: significantly more men than women apply for aviation jobs.

Consider this example: HQ has decided they want 50% of their hires this year to be female. Let’s say they are looking for 20 pilots.

Of all 100 applications they receive, 80 are men, and 20 are women. To hire 20 pilots, of which 10 are men and 10 are women, you can’t avoid having to hire 50% of the total female applicants, but only 12.5% of the male applications.

What’s the result of this?

The result is that if you were to rank all 100 applicants by their competency to do the job, a significant portion of applicants that should’ve been hired, may be replaced by less competent applicants.

This has nothing to do with males or females being more competent. It’s to do with statistics and the pool you’re pulling out of.

It is simply impossible to avoid this effect, unless you manage to get 50% of the applicants to be female. Now THAT is something that would actually be a solution to the main problem!

Tokenism

Hiring women just to improve the company stats, does not help women.

If you’re a woman who has gone through the same process as men to achieve your dream, the last thing you want to hear is that you’re special or you need special treatment.

You want everyone to respect and know that you’ve all gotten to the same place, because you are all of the same standard.

Backlash

When the emphasis is on hiring more female pilots, some men may start to feel frustrated about a perceived lack of unfairness and women getting special treatment.

Hiring targets and diversity quotas don’t do anyone a favour here. The Royal Air Force has experienced a huge amount of backlash for instance, when it became apparent they were discriminating against white men.

This is NOT the solution!

Undermining Fair Competition

The reason we have tried so hard to move away from discrimination and racism, is because it undermines fair competition. You want to hire based on competency, not anything else.

If applicants feel that factors outside their control, that have nothing to do with performance, will determine whether or not they get a shot, it will have massive implications to motivation and the culture of an organisation.

Stigmatisation

Sigmatisation is an overlooked one. To put it simply: if an organisation deliberately hires more women than men, some people may start to think anytime a woman gets hired: oh she’s just here because she is a woman.

A research paper by Coventry University showed female pilots themselves were concerned about this perception.

Is that an atmosphere we want to create?

Hire people based on competency, and this problem won’t be a problem. Diversity targets and quotas, even though well-intended, only result in women having to defend their case. This is not a good thing.

Short Term over Long Term Impact

We need to zoom out and look at how the issue starts. What is the root cause? Well, it starts with young girls.

As long as less young girls than young boys choose aviation, having a 50% female hiring target won’t make any sense.

Yes, a hiring target may impact the next quarter, which might look good on the books. However, we need to prioritise long term ACTUAL progress, over perceived short term progress.

What can be Done to Inspire Women to Enter Aviation?

There are a few things we can do to encourage more women onto the flight deck, without sacrificing performance standards:

Education and Outreach Programmes for Young Women

The only way to address the lack of diversity and women in aviation, is to go to the root of the problem: women are not choosing a career in aviation.

Until more girls are excited by aviation and feel like it’s available to them, this problem won’t go away – with or without hiring targets.

Companies like Easyjet are making great progress on this with their Summer Flight School for kids. Enabling children to experience the excitement of aviation, as well as tackling some of the incorrect social perceptions we discussed earlier.

Break Down Cultural Barriers

The above will solve this one by itself if acted upon. If the public perception is women can’t drive and women can’t fly, then it’s no wonder less girls choose this career over others.

Change like this always takes time, and sometimes even multiple generations for consensus to shift. Society is a massive ship, that can’t just completely change course in a few days. With the correct knowledge and action however, we can start heading to a better destination!

Improve Rostering for Family Life

As we’ve noted earlier, women – on average – have more priority on work-life balance. How much of this is based on children vs other factors is harder to prove.

However, one thing that is a fact, is that children influence women more than men. Wanting to start a family impacts a woman’s career more than a man’s. So to bring this in balance, solutions to work-life balance issues for women is something that will have to be discussed more.

Make Flight Training More Accessible

Costs and accessibility will help women and men. But due to the reasons mentioned earlier, it will particularly help with opening this career up for women. The three main areas that can be looked at are:

• Reduce costs, whether through sponsorships or government initiatives
• Especially for helicopters, ensure there is a system in place to rely on for starting a career, rather than the risky Wild West that we currently rely on
• Increase the availability of female role models that young girls can look up to and ask questions to

Resources

Why Women Still Choose Different Careers

UK CAA Showing the Amount of Female Pilots

ICAO Data on Gender in Aviation

How to Get More Women Working in Aviation

EASA Data on Women in Aviation

Coventry University on Factors Influencing the Low Amount of Women in Aviation

Conclusion

There aren’t many female pilots compared to male pilots. This is for a number of reasons, including old ideas about what jobs men and women should do, a lack of female pilots to look up to, and the difficulties of balancing work and family. But having more female pilots could be beneficial to aviation, because it brings different perspectives onto the flight deck.

Trying to increase the number of women in aviation by setting targets or quotas might not be the best approach. It may make people think that women pilots are only hired because they’re women.

Instead, we should focus on getting more girls interested in aviation from a young age, making it easier for people with families to be pilots, and making pilot training more affordable for everyone. By doing these things, we can make aviation more diverse, which will benefit flight safety!