Jetstar Aiming for 50% Gender Spilt in Interview Candidates

[psycho joe]

Orange Future. It's obvious from your posts that you aren't an Airline Pilot. You don't understand the nature of Airline pilot recruiting, the role of flight ops and its relationship with executive management.

You seem to believe that there is some sort of bias against women wrt airline recruitment. I can tell you that this isn't so.

Let's address some of your concerns;

20 PERCENT PAY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN.
Let's take two successful Airline Pilot applicants. Let's call them John and Moyra. John and Moyra join at the same time, have relatively the same experience and are employed under the same EBA. Therefore, they earn the exact SAME WAGE. And based on their similar positions on the airline seniority list and assuming similar high personal standards and ability, they will be offered a command opportunity at roughly the same time. So where is the pay difference? Well the difference between Moyra and John is that Moyra has a uterus and a desire to bear children. So whilst John continues flying uninterrupted, Moyra decides to take a few years off to raise children. The airline does what it can to facilitate this through mat leave and extended leave without pay. But ultimately Moyra will earn less over her working life in this scenario. So who do we blame for this? Nature? God. Men's unwillingness to grow a uterus and bear children?

AIRLINE RECRUITING AND GENDER FAIRNESS.
Firstly we have to understand that executive managers from CEO down are NOT actively involved in airline recruiting. They don't vett applications, they don't interview applicants and they don't set performance benchmarks for applicants. Beyond signing off on departmental budgets and okaying mass recruitment after flight ops has explained that planes are about to be parked up against a fence without more pilots being hired soon, they have nix to do with who gets hired. And even if they did, do you really think that CEO's and other exec managers really care about what demographic make up their front line staff? To exec management the staff are a means to an end, they are units of productivity to be measured in dollar terms.

Which brings me to your quote;

"No one has suggested bypassing a certain demographic at all. Increasing womens participation is simply broadening the applicant base giving the airline greater access to "the best person for the job".

These days every flight ops department has tight budgetary and time constraints and applicant experience and performance bench marks are set in order to get "the best person for the job". The relevant training and recruitment departments have neither the time the budget nor the inclination (desire to be sued), in order to be playing silly gender games. Put simply, if an airline narrows down 100 applicants, with defined suitable experience and only three percent of those applicants are female, then the only way to achieve 50% gender split is to bypass a significant amount of those applicants. Note; this is discrimination, it is grossly inefficient and a waste of time and money, which ultimately is coming out of the flight ops budget. Put even more simply, you can't hire people who don't exist. Ahhh, but what if we somehow "broaden the base" as you have suggested. The only way to do this is to reduce experience requirements and performance standards in the hope of finding a larger pool of the target demographic (females). Firstly, this is a flawed plan in terms of numbers. It supposes that there is a higher proportion of female pilot's with low qualifications to men, than women with higher qualifications. This type of recruiting would also put a massive and unacceptable strain on an airlines training department in order to bring low experience/qualified candidates up to the required standard. Of course, you could lower training standards, but then you have a less safe airline and no longer have "the best person for the job".

Which lastly brings me back to your statement about the present system not being appropriate. Why so?

Airline recruitment is expensive and considered, Pilots set the standards required and applicants are selected without gender bias. The results are generally, that the airline gets "the best person for the job".