Am I getting special treatment because I’m a wOᴍᴀɴ pilot? Or did I ever have to prove myself because I am a girl in a world that is dominated by men? I will discuss my thoughts and experiences with this topic as a female airline pilot. You girls out there should keep reading!
With a staggering 97% of commercial pilots being men, the field of commercial airline flying is one of the most skewed when it comes to gender imbalance. When you take into account women who are qualified to fly private planes but not commercial ones, those statistics change a little. However, even in this instance, there is a large disparity in the number of males and females. In 2011, there were over 617,000 qualified pilots in the US, 41,000 of whom were women, making up slightly over 93% of all pilots, according to the US Civil Airmen Statistics.
Regarding the latter issue, certainly, at one point, as in ᴍᴀɴy businesses. According to this article about Helen Richey, who on December 31, 1934, became the first wOᴍᴀɴ in the world to “fly a commercial airplane on a regularly scheduled mail route,” she resigned after just 10 months because of the way the male employees treated her.
Early female pilots were also historically hindered by the fact that certain height and strength requirements had to be met in order to qualify as a commercial pilot. ᴍᴀɴy women were prevented from even applying to become pilots since they are typically physically weaker and shorter than men.
Generally speaking, there aren’t ᴍᴀɴy problems with female pilots in the field nowadays; nonetheless, it’s noteworthy to note that it’s the passengers that have the worst reactions. There has been a significant effort made within the business by some airlines recently, such as British Airways, to increase the number of women applying for specific roles and, ideally, start to balance out the numbers. Therefore, if you’re a wOᴍᴀɴ looking to become a commercial pilot, you might currently have an advantage over the competition even though you’ll still need to bring the necessary sᴋɪʟʟs and experience to the table.
One idea is that ᴍᴀɴy women are put off by the deᴍᴀɴding travel schedule and time commitment required to be a pilot because they’d prefer stay at home and concentrate on their domestic responsibilities. There are only informal sources to support this lovely theory, albeit it may be a factor. The same can be stated for ᴍᴀɴy other industries as well, where the proportion of men and women employed in each sector is nowhere near 4,000 to 130,000.
Let’s see Girl Who Wants To Be Pilot When She Grows Up Gets To Fly Plane in the ᴀᴡᴇsome video below.
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Video resource: 1010 Wins
