Why Do So Few Women Become Pilots?

[Whirlybird]

Food for thought....
Female pilots: a slow take-off | Life and style | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jan/13/female-pilots-woman-flying-aeroplane)

I'm aware we've discussed this recently, maybe even under a thread with the same or a similar name, but this article seems to confirm what some of us were saying....worth a read anyway....

[localflighteast]

It is interesting in that it addresses why so few women become commercial pilots.

I'm still curious as to why so few are interested in getting a PPL.

[On Track]

Are there really so few?

Since I started flying I've met dozens of female student pilots, private pilots, commercial pilots, flying instructors, airline pilots... and of course female air traffic controllers.

They may be the minority but they're definitely out there, and in the course of aviation history some have performed magnificent feats.

[mary meagher]

Why do so few women take up flying? simple. Don't have the money and don't have the spare time. And once you have kids, forget it.

I started flying at age 50, thinking better get on with it...that was back in 1983, so you can work it out. I've done a lot since then, more than 3,000 hours, gliding instructor, tug pilot, IR, seaplane rating, having fun. Couple of years ago, a friend turned up at the gliding club and said "Mary, are they still letting you instruct?" Yea, I said, why not! "Aren't you approaching 70?"
"No" I replied "its getting further away all the time....."

So girls, its never too late, and women last longer than men!

[Ridger]

It's an interesting question. The article mentions what potential careers might be discussed in school and this may partially explain why different genders develop divergent interests. I also think career accessibility plays a part, and article aside, general media portayal can exacerbate it, the aforementioned Virgin advert being a case in point. The brains in my house belong to my wife, a chartered engineer and GA pilot. People are unfortunately often surprised by this! She mentors pupils once a month at a reasonably well regarded local state school and often feels exasperated that the majority of boys want to be footballers and the girls want to be pop stars. The common theme she detects, sadly, is their belief that success will arrive by fortune, rather than effort. Given the large amount of reality based zero to hero TV shows these days it's hardly surprising. Clearly things can improve. However, I think the important thing is that females can access exactly the same opportunities with exactly the same odds, rather than a balance of numbers per se.

[AdamFrisch]

This is the million dollar question.

Basically two camps - the one school says it's all socialised and it's just because women haven't been exposed to traditionally male jobs. The other school says there's interest spheres that are pre-determined, gender based and that you're born with. I wanted it to be the first theory growing up in an all female home, but I'm positive now that it has got less to do with how you grew up (although it does play a part, of course) and more with what gender you have. And studies show that that's most likely the case. There are differences between boys and girls from the day they're born. We don't just come into this world as empty vessels ready to be filled up with personality and gender preferences - we come with some of that formed already. This is easily empirically proven.

If you go to worldwide organisation Women In Aviation they will tell you that the number of female pilots worldwide amount to about 6%. But what's interesting is that it doesn't vary between nations very much - it's 6% in Brazil, Kenya as well as in the US. This reinforces the fact that it's not got very much to do with where or how you grew up, or else there'd be bigger differences between industrialised and developing nations. So the theory that it's all socialised doesn't seem to hold water when you consider the huge differences in acceptance of what constitutes a female career between the two extremes.

Women have done well in other former male dominated jobs like being a doctor, or law enforcement. But they all have one thing in common: a human interaction part, which the more technical (or perceived as such) careers do not. Although nobody is stopping women from becoming car mechanics, plane mechanics, pilots, machinists, carpenters, engineers etc - as soon as there is a heavy technical side to the job, women "stay away in droves" (as Sam Goldwyn used to say). The opposite is somewhat true, but to a much lesser degree. Men choose between a lot more professions than women do. I remember talking to the student advisor when I was about to apply to University many years ago, and she said men typically chose between 300 different educations, whereas the girls chose between 30. This is in Sweden, arguably the most equal society in the world between men and women. What is that number in less equal societies one wonders?

It's too easy to blame environment and socialisation. Assuming that if we just treat boys and girls exactly the same, and encourage girls to enter male professions (and vice versa), we will have 50% of each in each profession eventually. It will not happen - and we're setting ourselves up for disappointment if we think it will. That said, I'm hoping that a lot more women become pilots and will continue to encourage that. They make great pilots. I'd also like to see more female car mechanics, but I have even fewer hopes for that.

[john_tullamarine]

mary meagher (http://www.pprune.org/members/289925-mary-meagher)

Good woman, that girl ... go for it !!

.. and we expect to hear that you are doing aviating things still in your 90s.

[dubbleyew eight]

mary my personal goal in life is to be an active pilot at age 100.
I hope yours is too. :ok:

[Whirlybird]

AdamFrisch, there's just one obvious argument against your conclusions that career choices are to do with "nature not nurture" (I'm paraphrasing).....

Flying, particularly in modern times, is not particularly technical. Lots of people initially learn to fly to soar like birds, or something similar PPLs can have a social life in the flying club if they wish, and go to fly-ins. As an ex-instructor, I found my job was at least as much to do with people as flying. And in the airlines, team work is utterly essential.

Next, I don't think many people learn to fly because they're fascinated by the technical side, although some probably do. Equally, I can't see any young girls not wanting to do it because they don't understand how aeroplanes work. We have women drivers, don't we....and there were similar points raised against them many years ago. And do any of us know how modern cars work, or care?

As for doctors, for whom the same argument used to be quoted - till women started entering the profession in droves - they use an awful lot of machines these days. As do radiotherapists of course, and loads of those are female. And many other apparently people-orientated jobs.

Most jobs are a mix of technical and people skills, plus many other skills of course.

OTOH, I still remember the complete and utter amazement when I said I wanted to get a commercial helicopter licence....simply because I was female.
Yes, it could have been off-putting....

Sorry, but I think it's back to the drawing board.....

[KNIEVEL77]

Whirlybird,

I thought you might like this!

Whirly-Girls International Women Helicopter Pilots Coffee Mug Porcelain | eBay (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Whirly-Girls-International-Women-Helicopter-Pilots-Coffee-Mug-Porcelain-/321295474374?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aceb3dec6)

[mary meagher]

doubleyou eight, your post has raised a point so important that I am going to start a separate thread on the subject.

And that is: every pilot must accept a time will come to step down gracefully, before somebody gets hurt. Or to be more emphatic, before SOMEBODY ELSE gets hurt.

Some may recall Mary Russell, the dashing Duchess of Bedford, an early pilot, whose achievments are set forth on Wickipaedia. What is not mentioned is that her last flight, solo, which ended up in the North Sea, was very likely a suicide.

She was careful to the end, and took nobody with her, but she wrote off a very nice aeroplane....

I was a safe solo pilot and a safe instructor....can say that safely now because after an operation on the gimpy knee, a stroke developed. Clearly a wakeup call, so I did not even attempt to renew the medical. I still fly, according to British Gliding Association Regulations, with a qualified instructor - as I intend to do the interesting bits of the flight, taking off, soaring, throwing it around the sky, and a nice landing at the end. Anything goes pearshaped, its the instructor's fault!

So get to the point. We are not immortal after all, every pilot has a deep responsibility to assess his abilities, and to step down when that is the right thing to do.

[Armchairflyer]

Flying, particularly in modern times, is not particularly technical.Arguably depends on what is meant by "technical". As to not having to be a mechanic to fly a plane (or drive a car/motorcycle): true, and luckily so (at least for me http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/src:www.pprune.org/get/images/smilies/smile.gif). OTOH, given the increasing computerization in aviation (from G1000-fitted spamcans to the big and shiny jets), one could argue that flying in modern times is more technical than before.

Maybe the appeal of handling a big moving object for hours is simply more apparent to men than to women. Have no reliable statistics at hand, but my speculation is that the proportion of female truck, train, or bus drivers is not that much higher.

[Ridger]

Mary, you are a true inspiration. Your reasoning behind deciding to step down from solo flying and instructing is admirable, and probably not an easy process.

As for the debate at hand, the answer (which doesn't exist) would be worth considerably more than £1mil! I am continually amused by dichotomous nature v nurture debates within academia - if only it were that simple. Clearly there are differences attributable to both! Societal influences have as much to do with it as nature. Unless biology is the topic in question! A very good example of the natural observation is differences in how genders manage risk. Generally we see a greater proportion of males undertaking motorcycle racing, BASE jumping, wingsuit plummeting and free climbing. These aren't male exclusive pursuits, far from it, but the distribution appears skewed toward male participation.

I knew of a gliding instructor in his 80s who only stopped because his privileges were withdrawn due to concerns by others. Mary's example above illustrates a much more considered, consequence aware approach to the same realisation. However - we can't infer a sample size of two to the population.

It's not as if all men fly and only 20 women! Research has also shown that humans are generally insensitive to sample size because salient examples are memorised more easily. Attribution of the banking crisis to male risk propensity is a good example - while perhaps plausible, they can't all be boardroom bungee jumpers! I've met as many men as women who think the percieved risk of flying is unacceptable!

Not that gender risk propensity sufficiently explains it either. I've met roughly the same proportion again who simply aren't even remotely interested in the concept of flying in the first place.

[glum]

I too think the risk aspect is a large part of it. Flying is risky and thrilling in probably equal measure.

Certainly the stats show that young male car drivers seek more thrills, take more risks and have more accidents. Women don't seem to have such a need to feed their thrill gland, and consequently take fewer risks and have less accidents.

I think a large attraction to flying is the thrill of it. Men seem more ready to dismiss risk, or at least percieve the risk:reward differently.

For the commercial question, I suspect many women are put off by the sheer majority of male flying bus drivers. I have met and worked with many arrogant pilots, whose attitudes to women were firmly rooted in the 1950's and would certainly have put me off as a woman.

As an engineer we 'suffer' the same way - I look around my office of over a hundred and see about 5% of them are women. The women I've worked with in the past definitely had to try harder to achieve the same status as their male counterparts. Peer pressure counts for a lot.

I wonder if there's bragging rights too? "I'm a pilot" is a pretty cool thing to say ... for anyone. However, do women feel the same urge for one-upmanship as men?

[Whirlybird]

KNIEVEL77, I love the mug! However, it's not new to me; that stylised helicopter with the long curly eyelashes is the logo of Whirly-Girls, an international organisation of female helicopter pilots, of which I'm a member (or I was; I don't think I've paid my subs for a while). I used to have quite a few T-shirts etc with that logo on them, although I don't remember the mugs; maybe they're new. All the UK members I met agreed that only in America could you get away with a logo like that and still be taken seriously as an organisation! And that's a shame. And it also leads me to suspect that things are different in America with respect to women pilots - and having been there, they certainly seemed to be, at least in Southern California. But that's a different issue of course.

[Romeo Tango]

My experience:

I'm male but I gave my wife flying lessons to PPL as a wedding present. She is not stupid but found the whole subject quite alien. We men absorb quite a lot of the technical stuff over the years, many (more) of us have done physics O-level/GCSE so we know vaguely some of how an aeroplane works, we probably have picked up the principles of 4 stroke engines etc etc. All this was new to her so made the whole learning curve much steeper. She persevered and passed her GFT when 8 months pregnant. A month later she had the baby followed by another and (unsurprisingly) did not want to fly in a light aircraft again for some years and has never renewed her licence. Now she knows enough to .... comment on how I do it :*

[mary meagher]

And, Romeo Tango, she also knows enough to land the plane if you go U/S.

So a good investment on your part....

[Agaricus bisporus]

Why Do So Few Women Become Pilots?

Pretty obvious isn't it? Because so few women want to be pilots.

Nothing's stopping them. It's their choice. Why are so few women racing drivers, shooters, engineers, military? They're all things that appeal more to boys than girls.
Why are so few boys cabin crew? Beauticians? Nurses?

I'm surprised the question even needs to be asked.

[glum]

It needs to be asked as a reality check that there ISN'T anything stopping them.

[Flyingmac]

If I've learnt anything from this thread it's what dichotomous means.

Thanks Ridger. Though I'll probably stick to plain English.:)

[ChampChump]

I've no answer, but would dearly like to see the end of the pink toys/clothes default for young females. I thought things had changed a decade or two back, but when I read that Lego felt the need to produce its highly useful bricks in pink I realised we have made no progress at all. More importantly, schools should be teaching subjects equally. At primary school, I had the dubious benefit of sewing when the boys were learning woodwork (both would have been welcome), compounded by the time I left grammar school by the lack of any exposure at all to the things our male peer groups could enjoy, such as metalwork or car maintenance. Ergo, my only exposure to getting ones hands properly dirty came from hanging about the men of the family.

I suspect and hope times have changed in education, but as was mentioned in a post above, the meedja promotes some ridiculous ideas. The instant world enabled by the internet doesn't seem to be working for the greater good, although one would hope there's easier routes now to information for would-be pilots or engineers or umpteen other occupations.

My 2d worth.

[mary meagher]

My dad was a sailor. Grand-dad designed racing boats - invented the first hull that climbed the step. But he didn't drive them, his Chaffeur had to do that....

And Grand-dad to keep his offspring challenged, founded a one design sailing club that got a lot of youngsters out on the water. Wartime rather interupted this sort of thing, but in 1950 my Dad paid half the cost of a secondhand Comet, 17 feet long, which I sailed solo exploring the rivers of Chesapeake Bay.

A very good beginning for a girl to gain self-confidence and technical background at fairly low cost. We all learned to swim at an early age, that goes without saying.

Taking the next 28 years off to raise a family, I came late to aviation, but the background was there, the physics, the management of a craft with an airfoil, the weather, navigation, emergency procedures, judgement. The basics all too often missing from the power pilot insulated in his heated cockpit and cosseted by gadgets, imagining himself safe because ATC is telling him what to do.

My Dad was still alive and very proud when I passed the examinations and the flight test and proudly showed him my British PPL. He passed away the following year.

Thanks, Dad.

[Genghis the Engineer]

I think that children need a friendly handle to get into things. If that's pink fluffy lego, why not. I bought a neice a book on world history for Christmas - which I'm sure if it was a standard worthy book on the subject, she'd have ignored. But as some bright spark at the publisher did all the illustrations with playmobil characters, she loves it and is getting really enthused because it's not to her a worthy book about history, it's a book of stories about her favourite toys.


Interesting your experience with your Dad Mary. Mine was a designer at Supermarine originally, working on the UK's early jet fighters. When I learned to fly he declined to ever come flying with me citing it having been scary enough teaching me to drive. Strange thing is, it was my Mum who taught me to drive - and she loves coming flying with me.

People are strange creatures.

G