Just over 5% of airline pilots worldwide are female, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots. This means that for every twenty flights you take, just one of them will be piloted by a woman. To say this is embarrassing would be an understatement: it’s downright wrong. Yet in one country, that figure soars to 13%. A surprising leader when it comes to equality in aviation, that country is India.
Air travel in India has been growing at a torrid pace as of late. Over the first six months of this year, domestic air capacity in India grew 22%, making it the fastest-growing aviation market in the world. To meet such blistering local demand, Indian carriers like SpiceJet and IndiGo are hiring pilots at exceptional rates, many of them women. While the current fleet of pilots at both airlines are already 12-13% female, SpiceJet is upping the ante with plans to have a pilot staff that’s one-third female within three years.
Though it may sound like an impossibly fast change, the transition could be easier than it seems. One of the primary reasons so many more pilots are men today is that many of them grew up in the second half of the 20th century, a time when women were seriously ostracized from the skies. Yet as a new generation of pilots cuts their teeth, that attitude no longer holds. Flying clubs around the world are seeing more female students than ever before; the FAA says more than 12% of flying students are now female, and in India, that figure is doubled.
Still, India’s showing comes as a surprise to many, given that in 2012, it was voted the worst G20 country for women to live in (Canada was ranked #1). Things become less surprising, though, when you recognize that the pilot profession is one of just a few in India without a gender pay gap. Since pilot pay is dictated by union agreements and based on a combination of flying hours and seniority, there’s little room for gender bias to seep through. As a result, young Indian women are viewing a career as a pilot as a rare opportunity to be both highly valued and fairly paid.
Things are not quite as rosy in other parts of the world, though. While just over 5% of global pilots are female, that number is even lower, 4.4%, in the U.S. Yet not all airlines are created equal, and some U.S. carriers far outperform others. Of the world’s largest carriers, United Airlines has the highest number of female pilots at 7.4%, while others like Southwest (3.6%) pull the U.S. average down. American Airlines, which recently faced pressure after its flight attendants called its newest performance policy “inhumane,” matches the nation’s average exactly at 4.4%. British Airways, whose website was massively hacked over the past several weeks, and Lufthansa round out the global top three.
The question of why a global shift toward hiring more female pilots hasn’t happened sooner is a troubling one. A 2010 survey of 157 female pilots identified prohibitively expensive flight training as the number one reason why women don’t pursue the career. While high fees are certainly an issue—the Aviation Academy of America charges more than $50,000 for a year of training—men have to pay up, too. What may be a more insightful answer is the markedly different relationship men and women have with machines: while boys are often encouraged to get their hands dirty and experiment with mechanical objects from a young age, most girls are not. This may seem inconsequential, but as the sentiment compounds over years, it becomes a much bigger deal. It’s not easy to make a career specializing in machines when you’ve been told your whole life that machines are not for you.
What really matters, of course, is not the gender of the pilot, but how that pilot performs; if the American Airlines pilot who bought all of his passengers Papa John’s pizza last week had been a woman, it wouldn’t be any more or less of a generous act. The industry is certainly changing, though that’s no guarantee it will change quickly. The road to equality is a turbulent one, and pilots still have a long way to go.
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