More data on aviation’s gender pay gap has become available since our first post on this in January, and a theme has emerged across the more prominent pay gap reports.

This is that although men and women may be paid equally for doing the same job, the figures are significantly affected by the fact that the vast – the very vast – majority of senior and therefore more highly paid jobs are held by men. In most cases, in aviation, this means pilots. We saw in the EasyJet report that just 86 of their 1493 pilots were female; at British Airways the figure is 94% male, at Jet2 it is 95%, and 95% again at Tui Airways. The BA report helpfully notes what their figures would look like if pilots were removed from the equation – there would be a 1% gap, in favour of women. It is clear where the problem is.

So how do we fix it? We have seen countless commitments to ‘close the gap’ and declarations of equal opportunity and gender-blind recruiting, but what does doing something about it actually look like? It may be, after all, that recruitment policies and retention initiatives are not the source of the problem. It may be that it begins much earlier than that.
Continue Reading Little Miss Pilot: Where next for aviation’s gender pay gap?