When I get on a flight, my concern is largely that I eventually reach my destination in one piece. The ability to get passengers to their destination is the one thing I care about in a captain of a flight, and I suspect that it is the only thing that most people care about. There was one man on a WestJet flight who wrote a passive-aggressive note to the captain of his flight, indicating that he had his priorities all out of order.
In short, he thought that his captain, who was a woman, should not be a captain, for she was a woman. Why does this matter? I have no idea myself, but then I have more important things on my mind, like whether a that captain can get you to your destination. In this case, she did, and thus proved that she is worthy to be in charge of the plane. She also posted the note to Facebook, which gives the man and his opinions more exposure than he deserves, but here I am mocking him so I suppose I can't really cast stones in her direction.
WestJet itself declined to comment, largely because they don't care what this man thinks - using the relatively diplomatic statement that they don't want to give credibility to the writer of the note. They also gave the gender breakdown of their pilots overall, which sees a much greater number of men.
It is, in fact, a male dominated field, by their own numbers. A total number of 68 female pilots, against about 1,200 male pilots in the skies. That is a large gender disparity, but it's also not fair to really say much against WestJet in this case. They just want pilots, they don't care what the gender is, they will hire people who can get planes from point to point with a minimum number of incidents.
But still, whenever you see a male dominated field like that, some part of you does want to tip the scales in the other direction, seeing people of both genders take to the skies in equal numbers. I personally don't care who flies my plane, but looking at the numbers I wonder why we have significantly fewer female pilots up there, and if we might want to look at why there is such a large gender disparity in the amount of pilots hired.
It could be as innocent as young women having no desire to become a pilot, which is fine, people will be interested in the careers that they find interesting and you can't force them to change. It could be actual unnecessary barriers to entry, or a culture that makes it difficult for women to get into the career, which would require looking at ways to remove the barriers. I'm not saying that we should just throw women into the skies and see what happens, but that the opportunity should be equal and whether or not someone succeeds is then based purely on their skill at actually flying a plane, nothing else.
It would be interesting of the napkin man actually got people thinking about why there are so few women in the skies, and whether or not this is a problem that needs to be addressed. It's not completely clear that this is a problem, but I don't want a potentially good pilot to held back for arbitrary reasons. A good pilot is a good pilot, no matter their genetic makeup, and good pilots are what we need to get to our destination safely. If more women like the one harassed at WestJet can get their wings, passengers will benefit.
