I find shooting similar but with a weird twist. The girls are interested in the target side but are hesitant & will only initial go if they are not the only female.
Once they go & enjoy it they keep doing so but there seems a lot of pre-conceptions have been loaded into the girls before they even start with us.
It shouldn’t do but it does & as a society we are probably bout 150 years away before these issues are ironed out.
Why this is larger than us but it is something we can mitigate as Sqns are not meant to be Darwinal survival but where we develop all the cadets on different ways to help them become they best they are.
Another area is group planning or classroom tabletop exercise. If you have majority of boys then the girls just tend to sit part & be quite as they are not confident in speaking up. But once you get closer to 50 /50 split the girls speak up & get more involved than they would normally.
Well it does….it’s exactly the same reason that some people like brussel sprouts and others don’t. Or why more girls are attractive to ballet dancing than boys.
You can do all the surveys and advertising you like, but unless you put a gun to their heads, people won’t do what they don’t have an interest in.
The acidic taste can be very off putting. Normally they are over steam & the taste varies with water hardness if the area (similar to tea).
Girls typically & at a younger age have frames more suited to ballet & dancing so it’s easier to start with. People tend to do what’s easier & culturally girls are encouraged to do the vocational things rather than the practical.
There seems to be an inbuilt fear in some girls who don’t want to try new things & need the support of their peers.
Flying is a logical one especially if the cadet has never flown before. It could also be simpler that it’s a long way to your AEF & it would take too much time to get there. Or more simply your AEF keep cancelling so what’s the point in signing up. Your female cadets may just be being more pragmatic on a profit/loss basis.
Adults tend to be able to give reasons why they don’t like something. Young people are still learning & need that encouragement
5% of uk pilots are female, a shockingly low figure. Likely due to most of the last century having hugely sexist hiring and retention policies both in military and commercial flying.
As such there is still a general perception that pilots tend to be men, if you’re a girl and grow up with that perception, not surprising you might not want to put yourself out there.
I’m sure there are RAFAC initiatives to try and tackle the issue… But not that are publicised enough that I’ve seen them…
As per the saying … you can lead a horse to water, but not make it drink.
I loathe the BS about not enough women doing this or that in the traditional male ‘roles’, when there isn’t the reciprocal “outrage” about men in traditional female roles. It rubs both ways.
If people want to do something they will look to find a way to do it and special conditions should not be invented to give advantage of one group over the other.
I don’t know of any barriers in the ATC to girls doing the things we do, except some sports where the respective ages cannot compete against each other / in the same teams. If there are barriers please elucidate. The only barrier stopping girls is the girls not having any interest/not bothered, but this applies equally to boys. I no longer cajole or coerce cadets to do things if they don’t want to, it’s up there put their name down. I can recall when girls joining was first mooted, when I was 17/18 and having seen the local GVC I was not keen. But the girls that jpined entered fully into (they joined in the traditional coach songs, which surprised us) it and I was converted, even though as a sqn we didn’t get girls for 3 years after the trial. As staff I tend to view cadets as cadets as much as possible.
I think the tricky thing is that the barriers are what’s perceived and alluded to not by staff but by other cadets.
It’s a bit like the cadets from poor backgrounds not getting involved or learning leadership as “people from their class aren’t meant to be leaders or become officers”.
Once that confidence is given, that little nudge then they tend to be away & join straight in. It’s just that little bit of perception that we have to manage.
Just as a quick counterpoint, what should be avoided at all costs is tokenism - this can be more off putting than the initial barriers & gives the perception that things are not earned on merit but on background & who is favoured.
There’s a lot of things on the horizon to start removing barriers and to tackle the perceptions around it. It’s not going to be biasing things so people don’t need to worry on that front but does start to highlight the possibilities for female cadets and show them that others are already involved. It goes back to the if you can see it you can be it mantra.
And again, before people start to react, it’s removing barriers for all cadets. It’s so fundamental it even starts at the ACTOs.
This is human nature and boys will sit quietly and not engage.
Leave analysis to statisticians needing to prove they are doing something. Many of these things cannot be analysed and shouldn’t.
That’s because the ‘traditional’ male roles tend to be the better paid, higher status jobs. Pilot, MP, banking, law, doctors. The ‘traditional’ female roles tend to be the less glamorous ones, teaching, nursing, childcare, cleaning etc.
Again, due in a massive part because that’s what society until very recently promoted. Until the 1980s women were banned from flying in the RAF as pilots. A blanket ban. Just one example.
It’s only every recently that laws around workplace protections for maternity, flexible parental leave etc have finally started to level the field. But if you look at an industry and see it dominated by men, filled by men, recruited to by men, how you can possibly say that it’s the woman’s fault for feeling they wouldn’t fit in.
And there are drives to recruit men to under represented roles, primary teaching for example is a big drive.
But this nonsense, to put it mildly, that women don’t want to pursue roles such as flying commercially (I keep using this example but it’s what I do) because they choose not to is just blindly ignoring the facts. Earn the right side of £100K by 30 flying planes all day, there is no way that women are 20x less genetically predisposed to wanting to do that as men, that’s ridiculous. What is the case is that until very recently the industry was filled by men, run by men, and recruited to by men. If it looks like a closed shop, there’s a good chance it is a closed shop.
Lack of role models is a huge factor in people not feeling able to pursue careers that on paper are open to them.
Everything can be analysed - it’s how we find out about the universe. We can either write the calculations out & then forecast or we go with out gut & do trial & error.
Human nature is ineffable and it’s constant change means we have to deal with how people interpret things & perceive.
Whilst it would be nice (& a lot easier for us) if it was otherwise unfortunately the concepts of Fact, truth, perception & reality are all very different things.
I take it you’ve never used Twitter…
Not so much all aboard the outrage bus & more hailing the outrage taxis…
The survey work dismissed earlier in the conversation gave the team working on this the bedrock to build on. They’ve done the analysis of a huge amount of data and identified a number of actions to expand access for all cadets but have also used it to see where barriers for certain demographic groups. It may be boring but the data helps to work out what needs to be done and helps to develop the best approach for it. It’s all good and well to ‘know’ what should and shouldn’t be done but what cadets say will surprise you, and the adult staff responses had some very different results to the cadets. The cadets are the important people that need to be listened to so we can make the opportunities more open to them in the future.
Considering that the RAF’s first female fast jet pilot was Jo salter when she joined 617 in 1994. (Barabara Harmer was at the time a BA First Offficer on Concorde.)
The other thing in Mandy Hickson’s book was the at the time unknown differences in perception and reaction, for which the assessment has since been changed. Then there is the physical differences of body mass in regard to ejection systems plus such things as reach. Then there were the problems in relation to such things as diagnosed and undiagnosed pregnancy and high G environments and the sociological events such as capture in a combat zone.
In the civil sector, in the 90s they had an abundance of pilots leaving the armed forces looking for jobs and as part of their leaving packages the RAF would pay for the civil licences. Also at the time there was not the expansion of the civil sector with the arrival of LoCo airlines like Easy Jet and Ryanair.
I flew with a female pilot in a past job, just the same as flying with a male pilot, no differences and very very professional.
Edited to add, it costs about £70k plus in the UK to get to CPL standard, but if you saw the Easyjet documentary they have numerous female cadets as potential flight crew.
