People do say “I don’t care about the gender of the pilots, I just want to see the best pilots recruited”, but they don’t define what criteria uncovers “the best”. If the recruiting process is disproportionately favouring females (no solid evidence has been shown that this is the case however) could it be said that it’s not direct discrimination in favour of female applicants, but possibly the recruiting criteria now places more weight in areas that females may have an advantage in?
Better understanding of empathy, better communication skills, more maturity, less driven by ego? I’ll add as a caveat I’m not saying that women definitely have advantages over men in those specific areas. But there are some areas of Non Technical skills where women probably have advantages over men, especially younger men just out of school, and that may be the factor that’s seeing a slightly higher proportion of females make it to the final stages. Using this theory obviously they will also choose men who excel in those areas over men who don’t. Just a thought.
Once upon a time recruitment for an airline was probably who had the most hours in their logbook/who went to the most exclusive all boys school/who was mates with the CP/who was in the recruiter’s Air Force squadron etc. I doubt whether truly the best were being recruited then either, in my personal opinion the system used now would be better.
If you asked all pilots to define the top 3 criteria that the best pilots would have to excel at you’d get hundreds of different answers.