Airline Pilots
I wrote last week about the differences in the numbers of women and men who take certain college majors and it was interesting to see that roughly 30% of men took classes that we think should appeal to empathizers and 30% of women to those that we would think would be better for sytemizers.
As you know, those tests at the top there, the EQSQ ones (hey, they’re free personality tests so try them out!) are trying to work out who has a female brain and who has a male type one. Now, while our study so far is extremely rough and ready, those college numbers seem to imply that some 30% of men have a female type brain and 30% of women a male one. Which is of course why such free personality tests are so important: before deciding upon a career choice or college major it might be a good idea to work out which type you are.
What occured to me this afternoon was that we might be able to use these numbers in another interesting way. If it really is true that 30% have the other type brain then we should expect to find, say, 30% of the people doing a heavily systemizer’s job being female, right? So what would be the most intensely systematic job that you could think of? If you’ve got a better idea let me know but I chose pilots. The reason for this is simple. Pilots who aren’t interested in detail, who don’t follow the precise rules, who are not in fact intensely systematic, well, we have a different word for them. We call them dead pilots.
So, we might expect 30% of airline pilots to be female. Now, from a USA Today report on one of the first women captains, I’m told that in the 1970s (as recently as that!) there were none. From Women in Aviation International I get these figures:
| 625,581 Pilots | 36,757 (5.88%) |
| 93,064 Students | 10,809 (11.61%) |
| 340 Recreational | 26 (7.65%) |
| 251,561 Private | 14,554 (5.79%) |
| 121,856 Commercial* | 5,807 (4.77%) |
As you can see, nothing like 30%. But that is nothing like 30% yet. These things take time to change of course, so I would say that what we’re actually seeing is evidence that there used to be direct discrimination against female pilots (”No! you’re a woman, you can’t!”) and that the social changes are taking time to work through the system. As you can see from the right hand column (the number and percentage of women in each class) there are many more female students than there are qualified. So the numbers are at least moving in the right direction.
Hhhm. This is getting quite interesting don’t you think? We started with a little bit of research, found that we had a free personality test built on that and we’ve now got a (very crude, I admit) method of measuring discrimination between men and women. Yes, I think we might have to pursue this a little further. Now to think of the most empathic job I can and see if men are under-represented.
[tags]free personality tests, higher education, EQSQ, aviation, career choice, feminism, sex discrimination, pilot, [/tags]
March 21st, 2006 at 2:57 am
I’ll add a few suggestions for “empathetic” careers, some of which you’ve already alluded to: nurse, social worker, teacher, psychologist, conflict resolution specialist, clergy(wo)man, counselor, tour guide…
I think you’re right about there being an overarching cultural component to career choices. In time, I’m sure there will be a number of flights with female pilots and male flight attendants (which I have yet to encounter, coincidentally).
Something you might wish to delve into regarding career choices is how the military may contribute to defining certain roles for women and men. Women are barred from combat operations. Does this have any effect on their future career choices? Would their be more female FBI agents or police officers if they were allowed to serve in combat operations?
I enjoyed the entry and look forward to hearing your take on empathetic career choices.
March 21st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
In bringing up the subject of the military, Pangea opens the door for further consideration of why the percentage of female pilots is so low. Although we see a lot of news footage of female recruits, they seem to be doing things like driving service trucks and such. Any service to one’s country is noble and appreciated (except when soldiers take justice into their own hands as with the Abu Graib (sp) prison debacle.) My point is, many commercial airline pilots are veteran combat pilots. They get their training during military service. Flight school, like many high profile military pursuits (think of the scandals at Westpoint, etc) may not be particularly welcoming to women.
On the other hand, my brother is a private pilot,and aircraft mechaninc (such a systemiszer, Bro!) and he was married to a woman who also flies. He always lauded her precision and attention to detail, and says she was a better pilot than he. So there you go, always the welcome exception to the so called rule. As for male flight attendants, they are quite common on Southwest Airlines flights, and that airline is definitely an exception to the rule.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:13 pm
I’ve already been on flight with male cabin crew and a female pilot. As, I suspect, has our glorious editatrix here. It’s one of those differences between the UK and the US I suppose, that career choices have been less left to those cultural components. The UK has had a law for 30 years now making direct discrimination illegal. The first US woman pilot that I mention above, she tells of how she went to get flying lessons in the 1970s and was simply unable to get them at first. No one would teach her precisely because she was a woman.
But these things do and will change as you say, as the culture changes, and we will, not too far away now I hope, have people making their career choices solely on their personal desires and aptitude, not something erroneously considered to be innate to their sex.
As to highly empathic careers, I’ve been doing some research on nurse midwives. Some quite stunning figures (sorry, pun not intended).
The influence of the military I’ll need to do some work on. I have a feeling that the answer might be contrary to what you think. Precisely because women are not allowed into combat roles they concentrate into branches like the military police, thus boosting their chances of a law enforcement career. But that’s just me guessing about career choices at the moment. I’ll have, as I say, to look it up.
March 22nd, 2006 at 2:32 am
Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume, or write so it sounded as if I was making an assumption bout anyone’s experience of flying with male flight attendants and/or female pilots. This business about “traditional” roles holding fast reminds me of when I was a teenager, and read about Harvard and Yale admitting their first women students.
As arbitrary gender barriers are removed from jobs, I imagine we might see a blurring of gender lines in terms of EQ and SQ types of jobs.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Absolutely about the gender barriers! I’m all in favour of their being knocked down, so that people can make the career choice that is best for them personally, not one that is insisted upon due to their possession of a Y chromosome or not.
Similarly, I’m all in favour of EQ and SQ (and IQ tests if it comes to that) being used, perhaps with other such objective and subjective tests.
Objective as there is such a thing as innate aptitude, as we have with our tests. After all, there’s not much call for short basketball players (although that needs to be qualified by the meaning of the word “short”…it’s relative), slow sprinters and cooks with no taste.
Subjective as even if people do have an aptitude, they may not actually like doing what it is that they’re best at. I’m a pretty good economist and I was also a pretty good stockbroker. But I hated the job, simply couldn’t stand the way the whole system worked.
In the end, what we really should be hoping for is that people make their career choices on a realistic appraisal of what they might be good at and then within that selection, choose one that they actually like.