Well I am mostly in agreement with
Scroggs and
Whirlygig on this thread.
Thankfully, things have settled down since those heady days of "Womens' Lib" when even the most liberated women would not have dared to suggest that women and men were not equal in all respects! So sensible discussion is now allowed.
Modern reseach seems to indicate that there are differences that arise from nature, such as spatial awareness, or ability to multi-task. But I guess that there is a wide range of these supposedly, male or female traits within each sex. So perhaps 70% of men have good spatial awareness, but only 20% of women. The reverse may be true for communications and multi-tasking. So most women have no problem talking on the radio while flying, but have to concentrate, more than a man, while flying an instrument approach.
If this is correct then there will always be fewer women who want to be pilots, but more of them who want to be nurses.
At the risk of being shot down, I do think that some recent sex descrimination cases have gone too far. Some women seem to demand everything to suit their own ideas of mixing a career with child rearing. These women are not prepared to make the sacrifices that men made for a career in flying. They may win their own cases but create as much resentment amongst other women as they do men and make employers think twice about employing young women. (Leaves rapidly and hides!)
One thing that I have noticed when flying light aircraft in VMC is the preferred method of navigation . Most women seem to like reading the chart and identifying landmarks, while the fellas just want to make the whole thing boring by only using the GPS!
