Shattering 35,000 Foot Glass Ceilings – Women In The Cockpit

The following scenario happens all the time:

I’ll be standing by the aircraft door upon arrival with one of my coworkers, bidding our passengers “buh-bye!” when someone will eventually say to us, “Will you please tell the captain that his landing was fantastic?”

And I’ll cringe, because the person next to me was, in fact, the captain. She will of course be in a full pilot uniform, but assumed to be a flight attendant by virtue of her gender. And she will respond with unflinching grace and say, “Thank you,” without the error ever being acknowledged more than that. Or, if the person does, in fact, realize she was the captain, he or she will occasionally ask with a stunned countenance, “Women can fly the plane?!” To which I will often reply, “Yes! They also let us vote now!”

I give a lot of credit to my female pilot friends, because they have to have a fairly high threshold for some of the more blunt questions pertaining to their gender and their ability to fly a commercial aircraft. They handle it with such an even expression, such patience – the patience they often claim to lack in order to perform my job as a flight attendant. But my field is predominantly female, so whereas my work stresses usually stem from run-of-the-mill issues that can be fairly easily remedied, these women often find themselves needing to work harder to prove themselves in a much different work environment.

While there still are those who view commercial aviation to be a man’s place (A 2013 poll found 51% of those surveyed would be less comfortable with a female pilot), airlines are working to change that perception. British airline EasyJet has made recruiting women their focus, and currently boasts an impressive 14 percent of the worldwide total of female commercial pilots – with plans for women to make up at least 20 percent of their new hires by 2020. Royal Brunei Airlines has actively sought female pilots, and last year their first all-female flight crew, consisting of three pilots on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, touched down in Saudi Arabia, where they would not even be permitted to drive a car. And Singapore Air hired its very first female pilots this past year, their willingness to finally overlook gender spurned on by a tourism boom coupled with a pilot shortage. (Hey, whatever works.)

While their male counterparts and the flying public are largely very supportive of women in aviation, the numbers of female commercial airline pilots remain meager, only accounting for about 5.6 percent of the industry. Thankfully, the numbers are steadily increasing, thanks to recruiting efforts by individual airlines and groups like Women in Aviation International (WAI), who hold an annual conference to encourage more women to enter the field. So why are the numbers so low in an industry that many women find inclusive of them? Mostly the job plainly doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice to them due to gender stereotypes, which will hopefully continue to fade as more and more women begin to occupy the pointy end of the plane.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been on an all-female crew, and with pilots I’ve known since the very beginning of my airline career in 2003. I remember the day well, and we took lots of pictures and had a lot of fun, but the most amazing part was how unremarkable it seemed to be to our passengers. Maybe it didn’t make a difference to them, or maybe it was because they were just not paying attention. But the fact that it seemed to make an impression on no one but us was remarkable in itself. Even just a handful of years ago, you’d have people of either gender who would be wary of boarding a flight powered by so much estrogen. Instead, as we bid adieu to our passengers that day, the questions centered more on the location of baggage claim than on the ability of two of our most senior pilots, both women, to do their jobs. And we were never so happy to answer them.

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