It's not the hours etc, after all, cabin crew do fairly similar hours etc and there's no shortage of ladies wanting to be cabin crew.
I’m not sure it’s that cut and dried. My thinking is that Claudia Goldin’s Nobel prize winning work on the gender pay gap has moved us a long way towards understanding what is going on and has identified ‘temporal flexibility’ as the primary driver in why women, on average, earn less than men over time.
Basically that women are more likely to decide to do a job ( either within a career/ profession or an actual profession itself) that gives them the ability to have some sort of flexibility or control over time. The example she gave in an interview I listened to was that two identical law graduates, one male one female both start out at a prestigious firm, both in mergers and acquisitions, they’re required to be working any time 24/7, 2am Sunday the client needs you? You’re there.Go to Tokyo with four hours notice? You bet. Tough job but massive money in return. By the time both lawyers are 35 it is more likely that the female will have chosen a corporate role with a big company working more reliable hours with less travel than the male. When the pay data is crunched both lawyers fall in the same category, both graduated near the top of their class, both work full time, one earns $850k and the other $350k.
The reasons for women valuing ‘temporal flexibility’ more than males are a whole different subject and I know little about it, but the fact that they do is pretty well established from what I’ve read.
There is no scientific doubt that the sexes are very different physiologically, and then we obviously have social influences that have different results when applied to different people. Personally I think that encouragement is healthy but I would draw a line short of quotas. I’m not aware of any quotas in Australia though, can anyone give an example of one?
Aiming for 50/50 seems foolish to me but aiming to encourage women to enter aviation and having a stated goal of making the workplace an attractive place for them to be seems very sensible and I think everyone would benefit.
The biggest problem with being a pilot in the current age is the rostering and its family unfriendly expectations.
I agree 100% and it’s to everyone’s benefit if we can move to a position where the shift work and travel is recognised as a cost to the employees family ( regardless of sex) and managed accordingly.