I wasn't kidding about women being too smart to fall in the pilot trap. IMO, they are much more practical, maybe even steely-eyed, regarding career choices. The marriage experts list money as one of the primary sticking points, and (again IMO) one of the reasons for the high divorce rate among pilots is that the women simply can't come to grips with the head in the clouds mentality that's part of many pilots' psyche and the resulting paychecks they bring home--or don't.
It would be interesting to compare the economics of a cockpit job vs a FA job from the get-go. Assume that two women age 18 or 22 or whatever with no prior aviation experience decide to "live the dream" and fly for the airlines. One does it with a cockpit job, one does it with a cabin job. Who is ahead after 5 years? 20 years? 30 years? How long from making the decision until they cash their first airline paycheck? If the cabin job isn't fun, how much does that woman have invested if she decides to walk away? If the cockpit job never materializes, how much time and money will that woman have ****ed away just trying to get there?
Both of them have chosen careers that are chained to a seniority number and the next CBA, but the FA didn't invest 10 years and a ton of dough to get a burger-flip-wage job. Based on casual observation, it's pretty clear that many of the FA's have decided to stick around, and apparently much longer than the pilots.
I've seen the other end of this deal hundreds if not thousands of times, and from the other side of the table. Four of the financial planning offices in the firm I headed catered primarily to airline people, most of them pilots. I reviewed their files (as required by SEC/NASD supervision rules)and talked to the RIA's who handled their advisory work. Some of the pilots did OK financially, some didn't. If they made it through the maze to the left seat, they were reasonably well-paid if you looked at their highest-earning years, but they paid the price in many other ways (working up the ladder, domiciles, commutes, lay-offs, furloughs, bankruptcies, pension plans evaporating, airline consolidations, etc.) that severely limited their life-styles during their working years, but also their net worth and retirement life-styles when compared to other professions.
Not surprisingly, all of the financial advisors were former airline pilots or engineers who had seen the writing on the wall and bailed. All of them were doing a bit better than their brethren who had stayed on the sheepskin seats.
I understand that some people simply don't want to do anything except fly airplanes, and are willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen. For those folks, good luck and God bless, I just hope they don't change their mind. For those who are thinking they might want to do it and wondering about the life-style and economics of such a move, I'd encourage them to do a lot of arithmetic and even more soul-searching before choosing that career path.
It occurs to me that the disadvantages of spending too much time away from home, lousy hotels, etc., apply to flight attendants as well as pilots. There are lots of female airline flight attendants and no matter what the discussion about pilot pay, attendant pay is less. So, there is something else keeping women out of the left seat.
Getting back to the idea that sexual discrimination has totally gone away, so that is not an explanation of poor representation of women, well, there is always the legacy effect of past discrimination reducing the ranks of today's veteran female pilots. That still doesn't address the question of what is keeping today's cohort from being 50-50. If there isn't discrimination today, then what is it?
