To be honest I think it's being over thought somewhat. All the CEO is doing (if you read the article) is looking into the future and wondering where the industry's pilots are coming from going forward and is also using the fact that females make up such a small percentage of flightdeck worldwide so why not try and tap into that market and try and encourage more females to take up flight training. I think it's a good thing. Also all her energy clearly isn't taken up with this and the eye isn't off the ball regarding profitability, those that think so need a rethink.
As for the E175, well what can Flybe do? It was Mr French who thought it was a great idea, Saad H & COW have just inherited them and there's no way out of the deal. The E195 was the worst deal in aircraft buying/leasing history and the E175 wasn't far behind it, but Flybe are stuck with them, end of story. Saad offloaded 24 E175 orders for dash 8s with Republic Airlines, that was the only way out of the ones on order but it left 4 to obtain and those 4 have to arrive, there simply is nowhere to go with them. The reason Flybe had to expand so quickly was because they had to receive the Q400s in the Republic deal, which, let's face it if it didn't happen Flybe probably wouldn't be here today. These Q400s couldn't sit on the ground so routes had to be found to fly them and this is why Flybe are retracting as a business because in an already highly saturated European market the only viable routes were thin margin routes or an increase in frequency on current good performing routes. This still leaves Flybe with more aircraft than they want and the hand back and reduction in fleet is a slow process but at least it saved it's backside. The restructuring clearly needs to be done before the cash runs out and on that note the financial figures are starting to bear fruit which hopefully we'll see in the next set of results due out soon.