Dave,
As I commented back on one of the first few pages of this thread, the argument you gave (which, incidentally, I agree with) that by discussing this issue we are raising the profile of women pilots and giving employers food for thought when it comes to recruitment, may in fact found a case of positive discrimination against males.
As has been indicated previously, only 2.9% of commercial pilots are female (source earlier in the thread). If employers are now in a position where they are considering between a male and female candidate, then I am sure you will agree with me that you ought not to be selecting women JUST because they are women, to balance the numbers. Ability and suitability must prevail.
My concern is that the 'fight for equality' you believe this case has raised, if it makes employers feel intimated for rejecting women, raises the potential (note, this is a possibility only) that positive discrimination will take place whereby employers do not want to be seen to be discriminating against women and so take on a disproportionate quantity of women in relation to those actually applying, simply in order to quash gender discrimination accusations. Clearly we want to encourage women to get into aviation, but it is not BALPA's job to engineer the applications in the first place.
A rather practical illustration of this is at my university. Cambridge has an applicant make-up of roughly 40% Private, 60% state school, which reflects pretty accurately the proportion of applicants for those sectors. The government wants more state school pupils here, which I agree is an excellent thing. But to compare it with the case in question - we should be doing this by encouraging more state school applicants to apply initially, rather than discriminating in their favour when they do. In other words, we should work to ensure that women recognise that aviation is a viable career for them (which it is, provided they accept - as many on pprune believe - that it is not always 100% compatible with the lifestyle choice of having a child), but we shouldn't let the
JS ruling scare employers into tinkering the figures in their favour.