If QANTAS (or any Airline) are serious about increasing the number of Female Pilots then they’ll address it at the grass roots level. Attend School Career evenings with Female role models to inspire more girls to consider Aviation as career.
Attempting to increase the number of Female Pilots hired from the existing pool of those already qualified, without addressing the supply, will lead to failure. It’s not like flying schools are seeing a 50/50 ratio at entry only for women to be culled by the patriarchy, they were never there to begin with as far more Boys consider Aviation as a Career than girls. Ive wanted to be a Pilot since I was 5 years old. I moulded my entire Schooling electives around a career as a Pilot. Why aren’t girls doing the same? Could it be we simply like different things? How many 5 year old girls have model planes on their bookshelf? I did, my 5 year old son does, yet my 8 year old daughter couldn’t give 2 stuffs about Planes, no matter how many Airshows I drag her to!
The fact is, there are female Pilots and have been for decades. There’s just less of them than males and that can only be addressed at the grass roots level, if at all.
As for some of vitriol being regurgitated on this forum (from both sides), I would of thought by now people would have realised that exaggerated arguments, hyperbole and virtue signaling does nothing to help your cause, quite the opposite in fact as once you lower yourself to that level, along with pointless personal attacks, people simply tune out.
I finished School in the mid 90’s and started training as a Pilot in ‘98. Never in my entire schooling life were girls “forced into Home Ec while the Boys took shop”. Not once did I witness girls at School being told they couldn’t be Pilots (or anything for that matter). Plenty of my (female) classmates became Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers and various other professions of their choosing.... admittedly I did go to a reasonably high achieving Private School. As a Pilot, I’m probably one of the least educated of my former classmates!
Once upon a time (when you needed thousands of hours just for a regional T-Prop job), to be a successful Pilot you needed to have a strong passion for flying. Plenty of women have this passion, and I’ve worked alongside them (in both seats) over my career. There was just less of them than men. I’ve also seen plenty of (Male and Female) Pilots fall to winds in the early years as they simply didn’t have that passion to do the hard years in GA before making it to the Jets. However, I have seen vastly more Women than Men who, having survived GA, elect to either stop flying all together or limit themselves to specific fleets/Airlines due to lifestyle considerations. Some might argue that these Women were “forced to do so” by their evil husbands who insist it’s the Women’s Job to stay at home, but I haven’t seen any evidence to support this. Most of the Women I knew personally who made this choice did so before marriage and kids had come along.
Im not saying institutional sexism didn’t exist. It absolutely did and my hats off to the ladies who fought back and got to where there are today. I also acknowledge that there are still pockets of that era who need to hurry up and retire. But the overarching reality is, there’s a shortage of female Pilots in 2019 not because they’re excluded by the patriarchy but because they simply weren’t interested to begin with. Those who are, and have the same passion as their male peers, have done just as well in my experience.
As for being called sweetie, cutie or whatever... join the club. I’m a 40 year old man with grey hair and a gut yet I get called the same names by “legacy crew” all the time. My first flight on the 777 felt like my first day at School! “Oh look how cute he is in his new uniform! You’re just a baby!” Etc etc... I was 35!! It’s seems a generational thing, not a sexual advance. If you don’t like it, speak up sure, but every generation has their lingo... I can’t understand half of the Millennials slang!