Why It’s Time to Break the Sky-High Glass Ceiling Now

The lack of female pilots in commercial aviation is a well documented problem. Of the total airline pilots in the world, fewer than 6% are women. The industry has tried to recruit more women, yet significant gender disparity remains in its workforce. The origins of this disparity are strongly rooted in the many efforts throughout history to exclude women from both military and commercial flying. Even when the progressive policies of the 1970s outlawed gender-based exclusions, cultural perceptions of women pilots kept the sky-high glass ceiling firmly in place. This report examines these factors and concludes that the current global pandemic of COVID-19 presents a unique opportunity for airlines to finally break the glass ceiling in commercial aviation.

Introduction

Every airline pilot in the U.S. has logged at least 1,500 hours and trained in a range of challenging weather scenarios. Yet no flight simulator could have prepared the aviation industry for its greatest turbulence of 2020—a global pandemic. COVID-19’s spread severely impacted commercial airlines and the workers who command their fleets. Capacity cuts, travel bans, and looming layoffs have resulted in even the most senior captains worrying about their job security. Ambitious trainees and junior officers who had hoped to quickly climb the ranks in a previously booming sector now face uncertainty.

While the industry is discussing revenue loss and job cuts, it may seem counterintuitive to now highlight ongoing gender disparity in the cockpit. Sometimes it takes an unforeseen disruption, however, to create necessary disruption. The lack of female pilots persists in commercial aviation, despite efforts by recruiters to hire more women. Of the total airline pilots in the world, fewer than 6% are women (“The International Society”, 2020). Only 1.42% of captains are women. The total number of female captains in the European continent would not even fill a Boeing 747.

The gender gap in aviation is important to discuss right now because the workforce of the future is currently training to fly. When these aviation students emerge from their long training path, most likely after travel has rebounded around the world, a significant portion of the workforce will have aged out. Women will be needed to fill jobs in passenger and cargo transport, but many barriers stand in the way. The social perception of female pilots as an anomaly, the steep financial costs and undertaking of time to complete flight training, and outdated corporate policies on maternity are challenges for every woman trying to fly in commercial aviation.

To develop long-term resilience, the commercial aviation industry must look not only to the challenge directly in front of them but also to their workforce needs in the near future. The future is female, and investing in that future begins now. Providing support to women currently in flight training and modernizing maternity policies are two concrete ways the gender gap can be closed in commercial aviation. Another ongoing effort is highlighting current female pilots to change outdated perceptions about who a pilot should be and to mentor the next generation of aviatrices.

Early Aviatrices

Women in the United States found their way into the skies throughout history, despite efforts to keep them out of planes based on their gender. Bessie Coleman, born in Texas in 1892, was the daughter of an African American maid and a Native American sharecropper (Alexander, 2018). Her brothers, who had served in the military during World War I in France, told her about the French women who were allowed to fly planes. She dreamed of becoming a pilot and applied to flight schools across the U.S., but none would take her on account of her sex and race. Coleman moved to France where she could legally learn to fly. In 1921, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded her an international pilot’s license. In the U.S., it would be another four decades before the Supreme Court ended its Jim Crow laws and prohibited sex discrimination in employment. Until a mechanical accident in flight caused her untimely death, Coleman toured the United States giving flight lessons and encouraging women to learn to fly.

In the 1930s, the first woman hired as a commercial airline pilot in the United States did not last even a full year before the all-male Airlines Pilots Association and the Department of Commerce forced her out on the basis of her sex (“Helen Richey”, n.d.). Helen Richey was hired by Central Airlines in December 1934 after out-competing eight men for the job. When Richey began working, however, the Bureau of Air Commerce told her employer to ground her during bad weather and limit her flying to three times a month as they did not trust women to fly (Lynch, 2012). Male pilots who flew with her in the cockpit tried to make her uncomfortable. They also threatened to go on strike and voted to deny her membership in the Air Line Pilots Association. Amelia Earhart protested against Richey’s treatment to deaf ears.

Tired of her treatment, Richey resigned in November 1935, 11 months after her hiring. Outside of her brief career with the commercial airline, Richey set multiple international speed and altitude records in flight. No woman in the U.S. would become a commercial airline pilot again until 1973.

Wartime Opportunities

The disruption of World War II presented an opportunity for women in aviation to become recognized as an important and trustworthy resource. The U.S. government initially did not allow women to fly in combat, despite a pilot shortage during the war. The government finally organized a ferrying squadron of women’s pilots after two accomplished female pilots, Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Love, urged officials to allow women to fly for the wartime effort (Callander, 2001). 1,072 women were accepted into the Women Airforces Services Pilots (WASPs) program. The women flew the P-37 fighter and the B-29 bomber, two planes with such bad reputations that some male pilots hesitated to fly them. 11 women were killed in training and 27 in the line of duty (Cox, 1977). The WASPs were deactivated in 1944 after logging sixty million miles in service for their country.

Historically, commercial pilot needs in the U.S. have been filled by former military airmen in a pipeline from military to commercial aviation. The commercial airline boom of the late 1950s and 1960s led to a severe pilot shortage, which was written about extensively without it ever occurring to anyone to address the pilot shortage by hiring women. WWII pilots who would be qualified to join an airline at this time had already aged out and pursued other careers (Hopkins, 2001). The commercial pilot shortage continued until the Vietnam War, which created an influx of military trained pilots. By the early 1970s, most commercial pilots had gained their flight hours due to the Vietnam War, allowing them to bypass the acute costs of building flight hours as a civilian (Cox, 1977). The cost of building flight time continues to be a significant obstacle for many people who pursue commercial aviation outside of a military path.

Women, on the other hand, struggled to gain flight time during the Vietnam War and remained underrepresented in commercial airlines thereafter. Air Force women existed during the Vietnam War and were true volunteers in every sense, having no military or implied obligations. At first, the U.S. balked at deploying military women to the war. Commanders expressed concerns about “having to divert precious resources and energy to provide for the women’s safety, housing and other special needs” (Holm and Wells, n.d.). Eventually, Air Force women were deployed but limited to making their contributions as flight nurses who flew injured soldiers from the battlefield. Aeromedical evacuation teams did not have high priority for available aircraft, so they flew whatever the men didn’t fly.

Policy Changes

Although it still largely underestimated women, commercial aviation reached a milestone during the Vietnam War when it came to hiring women. In 1973, a couple years before the end of the Vietnam War, two female pilots became the first to be hired by commercial airlines since Helen Richey resigned in 1935. Emily Howell Warner was repeatedly rejected by commercial airlines, even though she was a federal pilot examiner with more flight experience than the newly hired male pilots she had to assess. In 1973, Warner was finally hired after applying multiple times to Frontier Airlines (Roberts, 2020). Bonnie Tiburzi dreamed of becoming a commercial pilot, but she was rejected by every one of the airlines. Still, she kept applying even after one airline replied, “We will never hire a woman so please don’t write us again” (Jones, 2020). In 1973, Tiburzi became the first female pilot for American Airlines.

The decade in which Warner and Tiburzi reached these milestones was swept by policy changes that re-examined the hiring of women across industries. When left to make their own policies, companies did not make significant changes. Legislation made room for female pilots but it did not make the room welcoming. The early days were uncharted territory for new female commercial pilots. Crews’ quarters at most airports did not have restrooms for women. Colleagues of female pilots were skeptical of their ability. Warner described an early flight when she extended her hand to a captain who entered the cockpit, “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t shake hands.’ He only said six more words to me: ‘Don’t touch anything on the airplane.’” (Roberts, 2020). Cultural change could not be signed into existence overnight.

Despite its advances in civil rights policies for women, the U.S. continued lagging in its perception of women as capable pilots in the 1970s and 1980s. It would still take another decade after the hiring of Warner and Tiburzi before Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space (Cofield, 2016). In contrast, the Soviet space program had already sent Valentina Tereshkova to orbit the earth two decades prior in 1963, making her the first woman of any country to go into space (Dejevsky, 2017). Major airlines in the U.S. found themselves caught between legislation that required diversity hiring and a culture that had long kept women out of commercial airlines. In one instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took United Airlines to federal court in the late 1980s due to its failure to hire qualified women pilots at the rate outlined by a 1976 consent decree. The order resulted in raising the percentage of women pilots to 5.5% from 1.5%, but it still fell short of the goal of about 20% (Yancey, 1988). This percentage closely reflects the workforce statistics that persist to the present day.

The Sky-High Glass Ceiling

While the number of women involved in the aviation industry has increased, from 0% to 5%, female aviators are still perceived by the general public as an anomaly. To be clear, women are an anomaly in the cockpit but not elsewhere. Women can be found in nearly every aviation occupation today (“Current statistics”, n.d.). Women already endure the same long flights and travel schedules as pilots; 79% of flight attendants today are women (Sherwin, 2019). The aviatrices in civilian, commercial, and military operations have repeatedly shown that they are no less capable of operating a plane than men. So why did major policy and corporate changes fail to create gender parity in the cockpit?

As historian Deborah Douglas explains, “The airplane may not be able to distinguish the sex of a pilot (or engineer, air traffic controller, flight attendant, or assembler), but human beings can and do” (Ware, 2005). According to one airline, public reaction was a major factor in their hesitancy to hire a woman. They believed passengers needed “a father figure” in the cockpit to feel comfortable (Cox, 1977). A survey conducted decades later in 2017 by researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University confirmed that the general public, even female respondents, were less willing to fly with female pilots compared to male pilots (Rice et al., 2017). In fact, respondents had the same levels of discomfort in having two female pilots in the cockpit as having an autonomous setup—no humans in the cockpit at all.

Women develop mental barriers from pursuing aviation at an early age. Decades of keeping women out of commercial and military aviation have formed a belief among young girls that piloting is difficult, dangerous, and “more of a man’s job” (Maksel, 2015). Research on women who pursued careers in military and commercial aviation found that direct exposure to flying in early childhood, such as visiting the cockpit during a commercial flight or having a family member passionate about aviation, helped overcome this perception. The perception was long held that women were incapable of and uninterested in the right to vote until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 (Bennett & Chambers, 2020). Likewise, the unfounded belief that women have a natural aversion to joining commercial aviation distracts from the important work that needs to be done to create career pathways for female pilots.

As with many debates about gender parity across history and industries, the question of who will take care of the children often arises in discussions about female commercial pilots. Mothers who have become commercial pilots find that their schedule has a unique flexibility which can make childcare easier to split (Hodges, 2018). These are the same flexible schedules, after all, that afford male pilots the ability to spend multiple days in a row at home with their families. Not being able to “work from home” can give a commercial pilot more freedom than the ordinary office worker when they are at home.

India provides a successful example of how commercial airlines could be more inclusive of mothers. IndiGo Airlines staffs the highest proportion of female pilots among the world’s major airlines, with 13 percent of its pilot force as women (Lekshmi, 2019). The airline offers daycare services and temporary office roles for pregnant pilots. Additionally, all airlines in India must offer a 26-week paid maternity leave to its pilots. In contrast, major U.S. airlines offer an average of only 6 to 10 weeks of maternity leave.

The pandemic presents a chance for airlines to revisit their views held toward maternity leave. As airlines must inevitably look at their policies around retraining requirements to bring back pilots after layoffs, it should consider the women in their future workforce. One frequently cited concern is that maternity leave would cause skills in women to fade, making them unable to come back to work. This contradicts a history of long-term pilot layoffs, however, in which male pilots were called back to work—no doubt a situation that will repeat itself after the pandemic.

The Pilot Shortage

While travel has stalled as airlines scramble to respond to the virus, the pilot shortage that dominated industry conversations prior to the pandemic still looms on the horizon. This is an important reason the conversation around gender disparity must happen earlier rather than later. A pre-pandemic forecast by Boeing on the years 2019 through 2038 projected a need for 617,000 new commercial airline pilots worldwide (“Commercial Market Outlook”, 2016). Driving factors for the U.S. shortage in particular include a decreased pipeline of hires from the military, an upcoming retirement bubble of 42% of major airline pilots nearing mandatory retirement age, and regulatory changes that increased minimum flight experience and hours of rest between flights (Gall, 2016). Moreover, this pilot shortage is likely to be exacerbated by the pandemic’s disruption to aviation schools and training programs. Qualifying for work in the cockpit is a process that takes several years.

The shortage of trained commercial pilots will be felt worldwide. In Japan, major airlines and universities have astutely continued to recruit pilots despite the current freeze in hiring. An official at All Nippon Airways explained, “Pilots are core elements of the aviation industry and we have to train them regardless of short-term business fluctuations.” Today the industry is hoping for the passengers to return one day, but when that day arrives fewer trained and certified pilots will be available to operate commercial aircraft. Airlines will have to retrain furloughed pilots. Time on a flight simulator costs at least $400 to $500 an hour to operate, while the simulators themselves cost between $6 million and $8 million each (Bushey, 2020). As airlines figure out how to more efficiently retrain the large numbers of pilots that have been furloughed during the pandemic, it would be wise to consider their maternity leave policies while making these improvements. In doing so, airlines can turn this disruption into an opportunity to change long term processes to better hire and retain a more equal workforce.

Conclusion

Historical and cultural reasons that women are poorly represented in commercial aviation must be fully recognized in order to enact any meaningful change in the industry. In summary, many more pilots are men today because they grew up in the second half of the 20th century when women were deliberately excluded from the cockpit (Bishop, 2018). While interviewing Emily Howell, who would become the first female hire at Frontier Airlines, the vice president of the airline wondered aloud what she would even wear to workin the cockpit, as only men’s pilot uniforms existed at the time (Langer, 2020). Howell passed away in July 2020 at 80 years old, having lived through both major transformations in aviation and little transformation at all. While the concern of what a woman would wear in the cockpit has mostly disappeared, the sky-high glass ceiling has not.

Harriet Quimby, born in 1875 and the first licensed female pilot in the United States, said, “In my opinion, there is no reason why the aeroplane should not open a fruitful occupation for women. I see no reason why they cannot realize handsome incomes by carrying passengers between adjacent towns, why they cannot derive incomes from parcel deliveries, from taking photographs from above or from conducting schools for flying” (“History takes flight”, 2019). Commercial aviation includes a wide variety of jobs, ones that women have proved themselves capable of doing with excellence. Her words are as true today as they were over a century ago when she spoke them. In this time of disruption, it is time to disrupt the industry so women can truly access the economic opportunities in commercial aviation.

References

Alexander, K. (2018). Bessie Coleman. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/bessie-coleman

Bennett, J., & Chambers, V. (2020, July 10). 'This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters'. Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/us/women-voting-rights-suffrage-centennial.html?searchResultPosition=1

Bishop, J. (2018, September 12). You'll never guess which country has the most female pilots. Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bishopjordan/2018/09/12/female-pilots-india/

Bushey, C. (2020, January 09). Airlines scramble for 737 Max simulators after Boeing says pilots need training. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-09/boeing-737-max-simulators

Callander, B. D. (2001, April 1). The WASPs. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0401wasps/

Cofield, C. (2016, January 14). NASA hired Its first female astronauts 38 years ago. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.space.com/31616-nasa-first-female-astronauts-anniversary.html

Commercial market outlook. (2016). Retrieved July 25, 2020, from http://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/commercial/market/commercial-market-outlook/assets/downloads/cmo-sept-2019-report-final.pdf

Coronavirus pandemic hampers training as Japan pilot shortage looms. (2020, June 13). Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200613/p2g/00m/0na/029000c

Cox, G. G. (1977). Women as pilots. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://scholar.smu.edu/jalc/vol43/iss1/7/

Current statistics of women in aviation careers in U.S. (n.d.). Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.wai.org/resources/waistats

Dejevsky, M. (2017, March 29). The first woman in space: 'People shouldn't waste money on wars'. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/mar/29/valentina-tereshkova-first-woman-in-space-people-waste-money-on-wars

FAA boosts aviation safety with new pilot qualification standards. (2013). Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=14838

Fikes, R. (2017, September 24). Marlon DeWitt Green (1929-2009). Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/green-marlon-dewitt-1929-2009/

Gall, P. (2018, July 13). The U.S. has a shortage of pilots - and it's going to get worse. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-has-a-shortage-of-pilots-and-its-going-to-get-worse-2018-07-13

Helen Richey: First female commercial pilot. (n.d.). Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://sandiegoairandspace.org/exhibits/online-exhibit-page/helen-richey-first-female-commercial-pilot

History takes flight: A spotlight on five trailblazing women in aviation. (2019, March 25). Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://www.vaughn.edu/blog/five-influential-women-in-aviation-who-made-history/ 

Hodges, R. (2018, July 03). Where are all the female pilots? One of UK's few female captains explains. Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/why-are-there-so-few-female-pilots--/

Holm, J. M., & Wells, S. P. (n.d.). Air Force women in the Vietnam war. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from http://www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/jholm.pdf

Hopkins, G. E. (2001, February). A short history of pilot shortages. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from http://www3.alpa.org/portals/alpa/magazine/2001/Feb2001_ShortHistory.htm

Jones, L. (2020, March 08). The real reason there are so few female pilots. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://thepointsguy.com/news/the-real-reason-there-are-so-few-female-pilots/

Langer, E. (2020, July 23). Emily Howell Warner, pioneer of commercial aviation, dies at 80. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/emily-howell-warner-pioneer-of-commercial-aviation-dies-at-80/2020/07/23/56cd1ac2-cc55-11ea-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html

Lekshmi, P. S. (2019, June 11). Women in the sky: 4 reasons why India is a trailblazer for gender equality in aviation. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://www.thebetterindia.com/185634/india-highest-women-pilots-in-world-gender-equality-aviation/

Lynch, A. (2012, March). Hometown heroine: Helen Richey. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.historynet.com/hometown-heroine-helen-richey.htm

Maksel, R. (2015, February 06). Why are there so few female pilots? Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/why-are-there-so-few-female-pilots-180954115/

Martin, P., & Barnard, A. (2013). The experience of women in male-dominated occupations: A constructivist grounded theory inquiry. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 39(2). doi:10.4102/sajip.v39i2.1099

Mccarthy, F., Budd, L., & Ison, S. (2015). Gender on the flightdeck: Experiences of women commercial airline pilots in the UK. Journal of Air Transport Management, 47, 32-38. doi:10.1016/j.jairtraman.2015.04.001

McLoughlin Morrison, S. (2020, May 18). How greater diversity in the cockpit could help airlines avoid a looming pilot shortage. Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://theconversation.com/how-greater-diversity-in-the-cockpit-could-help-airlines-avoid-a-looming-pilot-shortage-123242

Millbrooke, A. M. (2006). Early Flight/Flying Competitions. In Aviation history (pp. 3-23). Englewood, CO: Jeppesen.

Mitchell, J., Kristovics, A., & Vermeulen, L. (2006, April). Gender issues in aviation: Pilot perceptions and employment relations. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://bi-gale-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/essentials/article/GALE%7CA155039773?u=embry&sid=summon

Perkins, K. (2018, March 21). Chances are your pilot isn't a woman. Here's why. Retrieved July 23, 2020, from http://seattlebusinessmag.com/chances-are-your-pilot-isnt-woman-heres-why

Rice, S., Winter, S., Tamilselvan, G., & Milner, M. (2017). Attitudes toward controlled rest in position (CRIP): A gender comparison between pilots and non-pilots. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://commons.erau.edu/ijaaa/vol4/iss3/6/

Roberts, S. (2020, July 17). Emily Howell Warner, who broke a sky-high glass ceiling, dies at 80. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/emily-howell-warner-dead.html

Sherwin, G. (2019, December 10). The airline industry's sexism problem. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/opinion/pregnancy-discrimination-frontier-airlines.html

Strong, O. (1992, October 14). United pilot files a sexual harassment suit: Workplace: The woman alleges that her colleagues made sexual advances and one of them sexually assaulted her. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-14-fi-148-story.html

Tedeschi, D. (2019, November 19). The day Tammie Jo Shults stepped up. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.airspacemag.com/airspacemag/day-tammie-jo-shults-stepped-180973595/

The International Society of Women Airline Pilots. (2020). Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://s3.amazonaws.com/ClubExpressClubFiles/658242/documents/2020_copy_1311525975.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIA6MYUE6DNNNCCDT4J&Expires=1595929015&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D2020_copy.pdf&Signature=1g23D0bghexAyZYuyY4z0Dott1U%3D

Ware, S. (2005). American women and flight since 1940 (review). Technology and Culture, 46(1), 228-229. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0055

Wells, J. (2019, August 05). Top US airlines want to hire women pilots. So where are the applicants? Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/02/top-us-airlines-want-to-hire-women-pilotswhere-are-the-applicants.html

Yancey, M. (1988, September 12). Court asked to hold airline in contempt over pilot hiring. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://apnews.com/197ddfed7f335f05d568158fd7f15894