Europe's airlines lament lack of female engineers and pilots
Two of Europe's biggest airline groups would like to see more women taking up engineering and pilot roles, but cite a lack of female applicants that is making progress tough. "We are still finding that when we advertise for jobs… we are getting 70%, 80% male applicants," said IAG CE Willie Walsh during a panel discussion at the A4E Aviation Summit. "It should be 50:50. And I can't understand why it wouldn't be 50:50, other than we are just not yet convincing young women that aviation holds opportunities for them." Ryanair CE Michael O'Leary says his airline likewise finds that applicants for pilot roles tend to be overwhelmingly male. "We do recruitment days for pilot cadets – it's 90% male and 10% female," he says. "You do a recruitment day for cabin crew, it's the other way around: it's 80-20 female-male. We need to encourage more women to consider [airline] pilot as a career. At the same event, Boeing's senior vice-president of commercial sales and marketing Ihssane Mounir suggested that the airframer had found some success in improving the gender balance in engineering roles by educating girls about careers in aviation from a young age. "It had to be a deliberate plan to do it," Mounir says. "You had to go work at the lower levels, the high-school levels, before high-school levels, and get young ladies very interested in the engineering world and making sure that they feel comfortable doing it."<br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2019-03-11/general/europes-200bairlines-lament-lack-of-female-engineers-and-pilots
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Europe's airlines lament lack of female engineers and pilots
Two of Europe's biggest airline groups would like to see more women taking up engineering and pilot roles, but cite a lack of female applicants that is making progress tough. "We are still finding that when we advertise for jobs… we are getting 70%, 80% male applicants," said IAG CE Willie Walsh during a panel discussion at the A4E Aviation Summit. "It should be 50:50. And I can't understand why it wouldn't be 50:50, other than we are just not yet convincing young women that aviation holds opportunities for them." Ryanair CE Michael O'Leary says his airline likewise finds that applicants for pilot roles tend to be overwhelmingly male. "We do recruitment days for pilot cadets – it's 90% male and 10% female," he says. "You do a recruitment day for cabin crew, it's the other way around: it's 80-20 female-male. We need to encourage more women to consider [airline] pilot as a career. At the same event, Boeing's senior vice-president of commercial sales and marketing Ihssane Mounir suggested that the airframer had found some success in improving the gender balance in engineering roles by educating girls about careers in aviation from a young age. "It had to be a deliberate plan to do it," Mounir says. "You had to go work at the lower levels, the high-school levels, before high-school levels, and get young ladies very interested in the engineering world and making sure that they feel comfortable doing it."<br/>
