Looking up

In a 2016 report by Australian Industry Standards, the aviation industry was shown to have improved in gender participation, with 20% of employees being female. This falls short of the 46% seen across most other industries in Australia. Alarmingly, this figure drops to a mere 10% when looking at specialised roles within the industry, largely because of the disproportionate amount of women working in flight attendant roles.

Women only make up 4-9% of pilots. This startling figure becomes alarming when considering that Boeing forecasts the need of an additional 637,000 commercial pilots in the next two decades. But where will all these pilots come from if less than 10% of them will be female?

It’s not all doom and gloom, with the recent celebration of Australia’s first female fight pilot setting the right momentum to change the tide. Aerospace businesses are joining the diversity conversation as well. Organisations like Lockheed Martin, the Australian Army and the RAAF all partnering to support leading industry diversity NFP Women in Aviation/Aerospace, and Qantas who is continually pushing the boundary in progressive leadership and strategy. The the wheels are turning, and industry is moving towards diversity.

For young women studying and entering into the industry now, their journey will undoubtedly be easier than the women before them. But there are still hurdles and barriers that are preventing aerospace to perform as well as other industries.

One factor to consider is the time it takes to overcome stigmas and stereotypes. For decades (or longer) aerospace has been considered a man’s job and a boys club. Clearly the practical aspects of travel played a role in prohibiting women from participating, but now that the days of women needing to stay near the family home to take care of children are over, a proactive effort to counteract these long established norms and stereotypes. This effort has to be sustained over time. It took time to recover from these old social norms and update them to current standards.

‘It took time to recover from these old social norms.’

A barrier that women entering the industry face is everyone’s unconscious bias – including women. While work can be done to remove the masculine phrasing of job descriptions, and heritage processes and systems that were designed by-and-for men, an unconscious bias is tough to combat directly. Unconscious bias starts with the girls themselves, how they evaluate their own success and capability at university and before. How they position themselves against their peers. It affects what roles girls even apply for and how they articulate their value proposition. All of this happens before they reach industry where they will then battle the biases of others as well.

Of course these biases are formed before higher education, starting with influencers at school, at home and increasingly in the media. Role models at this stage may not be informed of changing career trends or opportunities, or they might just not be speaking about it at the right times. The positive is that there is an abundance of opportunities for girls to learn STEM at school, with more programs and focus than ever being applied to encourage girls into STEM. The shortcoming of these efforts may simply be in joining the dots of what careers that leads to and what their ambitions could be.

Role Modelling Leads to Greater Ambitions

Having strong, positive role models and mentors are paramount when trying to encourage more women to choose a career in any industry. Whilst there a plenty of examples that disprove the saying “you can’t be what you can’t see”, having examples of people to point to and learn from, does make achieving that career seem much more realistic.

In 2013, a study by The Glass Hammer and Accenture found that: “The vast majority (83.3 percent) of women in tech who said they wanted a C-Suite job also said they had a role model.”

There are some tremendous women working in the aerospace industry who would make incredible role models for anyone wanting to enter the industry. It isn’t possible to make an exhaustive list of accomplished and ambitious women within the aerospace field, the following women are quite inspirational and worth sharing with any young girl with an aerospace dream.

Claudine Ogilvie
CIO at Jetstar Airways

Andrea Boyd
ISS Flight Operations Engineer at European Astronaut Centre

Kathleen Boseley
Head of Independent Designs at Airbus Group

Angela Wiggins
Chief Counsel at BAE Systems

Marija Jovanovich
Squadron Leader, Qualified Test Pilot at Royal Australian Air Force

Flavia Tata Nardini
CEO and CoFounder at Fleet Space Technologies

What are people doing to help?

There are a number of groups advocating for more women to join aerospace industries. Last month, a social media campaign launched on International Women’s Day by aviation/aerospace australia called #givegirlswings. Campaigns like this aim to fight stereotypes and provide awareness on what types of careers are available in the aerospace industry. Campaigns like #getgirlswings, similar to the 2015 #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign, are driven by social media, which not only fights stereotypes broadly, but has the ability to reach younger women who might be considering their career options.

Industry bodies like Aviation/Aerospace Australia and Engineers Australia advocate for higher rates of female participation, encouraging women to progress and succeed within the industry as well as grass roots educational initiatives around ensuring young girls have the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) skills they will need to join the aerospace industry.

To encourage women who are at the stage of entering university to continue their studies, there are many incentives. Most major universities around the country offer scholarship programs for women entering studies within STEM fields which may turn the dial for those who are choosing between two or more different areas to study. Once at university, the student run branches of groups like AIAA and AYAA offer a range of support, networks and seminars to support all aerospace students.

At a younger level, the effort to encourage school-aged girls into aerospace is fragmented. The need for young australians to pick up STEM skills more broadly dwarfs the efforts of any particular industry. Programs like Tech Girl Superheros and Go Girl, Go for IT have good reach across the country for encouraging young girls to focus on general technology skills. There is very little in the way of aerospace focused girls programs. There are school programs aimed at encouraging students in general to take on the aerospace industry, including programs like Cuberider’s space program on the ISS, Zero Robotics competitions and the iSTEM program. There are also a number of larger aerospace organisations which sponsor and support local schools in one-off projects or mentorship.

‘The effort to encourage school-aged girls into aerospace is fragmented.’

If the aerospace industry wants to attract more people than those who have loved the industry since childhood, then a more collaborative and organised approach to high school outreach is needed.

What if this is all for nothing?

In February 2018, a study was published by researchers at Leeds University called: The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. This study found, much to everyone’s surprise, that in countries which had the highest rates of gender equality, there are some of the smallest number of female graduates in STEM degrees. Countries that are ranked top in the world for gender equality like Norway and Finland, have some of the worst rates of gender parity in STEM courses, whilst the opposite was found true for countries ranked at the bottom of gender equality like Algeria and UAE, which have mostly women graduating from STEM degrees.

Whilst this research is new, is does cast a new light on current STEM education efforts. The researchers provided some suggestions as to what might cause this paradox to occur. It may be to do with the stability and assuredness within these countries which enables women to choose what they would enjoy doing, as opposed to what they ‘should’ do, or choose a career for economic reasons. It may also have to do with heritage stereotypes of the west which mightn’t have existed in the same way as in countries like Iran.

Whilst the referees are still out deliberating what this new data and insight means, we should remain calm and continue with our efforts.