That roughly chimes with what I’m seeing and hearing on the radio. Subjectively I’d say it’s even more than that, but that may have to do with my location in SoCal.
One would have to distinguish between pilots aiming for a career in aviation and the amateur pilots. I believe flying is a mostly male hobby like everything technical while there are quite a few more women flying airliners. But who am I to complain, the percentage of women in aviation is already 3 times as high as the percentage of women was when I was studying electrical engineering.
Re: that is around 3x more than over here.
Any thoughts as to the reason why 1 in 18 EU v 1 in 6 USA?
Obviously US women are way cooler on average 
sonoeuroga wrote:
Any thoughts as to the reason why 1 in 18 EU v 1 in 6 USA?
Based on discussions with my two daughters, it probably has to do with several factors, the main one is that there are very few women in aviation. If you are a young woman going to a typical airport, you won’t see many people that look like you – most instructors I know – with one exception – are men over 40. I think if you are a woman you know what it’s like to walk into a room full of men – not always comfortable.
In the US, there has been a lot of work done by women in aviation to grow the number of women flying, and they’ve been at it for decades, even then with limited success.
I tried to get my girls into flying, but they just had zero interest in it. It’s like getting on a train or in a car, just a tool, not done for pleasure. They were exposed to flying from birth, and perhaps that took away the magic for them – it was just always there.
Things we can do to make it more interesting for women to fly are numerous – from the basics like ensuring that there are clean toilets at airports, to more advanced, like making “top gun” movies with women as the stars.
My first instructor was a woman. She was bloody marvellous. Sadly for us she went off to fly passengers to and from Orly.
I know 2 other women instructors in this area, and we have several female pilots at our club.
On the BIA (Brevet Initiation Aeronautique) that we run, just less than a third of class are female.
But this ratio is better than it used to be by a long way.
So IMO the reason we don’t see so many females flying is for the same reason that we can’t seem to persuade girls into science and technology and engineering subjects. And what that reason is, I have no idea.
It’s not just aviation. There are far more female engineers in the US than here. There just isn’t the social stigma that directs women away from technical occupations (except, perhaps, medicine) over there. This is certainly rampant in UK.
Another factor is an educational environment where very few teachers (male or female) are able to act as role models for youngsters wishing to pursue a technical career.
In UK, if you admit to being an engineer, you’re likely to be asked to fix the Fridge. If you admit to being a pilot, you’re liable to be asked how you pay for it.
In our club the numbers of female pilots are rising. On the other Side my son and daughter are not very interested in flying, Maybe this will change when they had the chance to be my passengers. I fullfilled the requirements to carry passengers about 2 weeks before.
Engineering is another topic. My daughter and her female friends are very frightened about electrical engineering and other technical topics. Regardless she is preparing for the bachelor of ‘economical engineering’, i don’t now if that’s the correct translation of “Wirtschaftsingenieur”.
Many young females were tought at home that technical education is much to complicated, so many won’t offer this way of education.
This is called the gender equality paradox. Millions of Euros are being poured into research around that and not much comes out of it except for some well paid gender equality officer BS jobs and the surprising finding that men and women are indeed different.
But I believe aviation the reasons for few women are a bit different to the Stem situation because it can attract people who like it for the tech as well as people who just like flying around without the need to understand why airplanes actually fly. I have the impression that where less tech is involved, more women are present. If you look at the image galleries of the gliding clubs in Germany you will find at least 20% of girls. That is probably more than boys who are into horse riding. Speaking of that, does anybody know if the other side also complains about the low number of males in their area of interest?
