Pilot Schemes
Laura Beers
In her speech to the Conservative Party conference last week, as well as overseeing the expulsion of a pair of young Greenpeace protesters and attacking the spectre of an ‘anti-growth coalition’, Liz Truss told a story from her childhood:
I know how it feels to have your potential dismissed by those who think they know better. I remember as a young girl being presented on a plane with a ‘Junior Air Hostess’ badge. Meanwhile, my brothers were given ‘Junior Pilot’ badges. It wasn’t the only time in my life that I have been treated differently for being female or for not fitting in. It made me angry and it made me determined. Determined to change things so other people didn’t feel the same way.
As the Spectator noted, this ‘unexpectedly woke complaint’ was the only moment in the prime minister’s speech that was animated ‘with the pulse of felt experience’.
Truss is three years older than I am. The first time I went on a plane (after primary school), airlines were handing out ‘junior pilot’ wings to both boys and girls. Truss either began flying much younger than I did, or had the misfortune to encounter the last vestiges of a sexist tradition developed in the 1960s. But even if airlines had largely abandoned the ‘junior air hostess’ scheme by the 1980s, gender discrimination in the industry was real then and it’s real now. Fewer than 5 per cent of British pilots are female. In the US, the figure is 5.5 per cent.
There’s nothing inherently male about flying planes, as Amelia Earhart demonstrated when she flew across the Atlantic in 1928. Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, a favourite with my six-year-old son (and me),traces the history of female aviation back to 1784, when Elisabeth Thible became the first women to fly in a hot air balloon. In Top Gun: Maverick, two of the eleven younger aviators are women; among actual US navy pilots, the ratio’s closer to one in eight.
The Greenpeace protesters ejected from the Tory Party conference might reasonably argue that the world needs fewer aircraft, not more women pilots. But the gender disparity on the flight deck is only a stark example of the inequity that persists across other professions. The reasons there are so few female pilots are structural, and addressing those structural inequities would require not only ‘determination’ on the part of would-be female aviators, but structural changes to patterns of work and childcare which feminists have long advocated, but successive governments have failed to prioritise.
Two years ago, The Points Guy travel blog ran a story on ‘the real reason there are so few female pilots – and what airlines should do about it’. The article emphasised the need to encourage girls and young women to pursue STEM education, and the importance of airlines showing female pilots in advertising and promotional materials, but it also asked:
Can being a pilot and a mother successfully coexist? … [P]ilots have a longer, tougher path to being hired and staying employed by an airline [than flight attendants]. They undergo training and examining throughout their career, including intensive flight simulator sessions and annual line checks. It’s a vocation. If airlines are serious about increasing the number of female pilots, their flexible working policies need to meet the needs of women.
The Conservatives included a pledge in their 2019 manifesto to ‘encourage flexible working and consult on making it the default unless employers have good reasons not to’, a policy that Truss, as minister for women and equalities, had promised would benefit women in particular. The government has yet to put forward an employment bill that would enshrine such changes into law. (Truss told the BBC in 2019 that she considered herself a ‘Destiny’s Child feminist’ who supported ‘independent’ women, not ‘victims who need special help and special treatment’.)
At the same time, the prime minister’s proposals to decrease the ‘red tape’ associated with the provision of early years care, by paying childcare subsidies directly to parents rather than to Ofsted-licensed providers, may further decrease the availability and quality of day nurseries.
While Truss, and her role model Margaret Thatcher before her, succeeded to the highest post in the male-dominated field of party politics without the formalised support structures present in many other countries, they both benefited from a degree of socioeconomic capital denied to most British women. Instead of platitudes, we need targeted government support in the form of employment and social policies that will enable women to balance work and childcare.
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