The reality is that the aviation sector unfortunately still has to work harder than most other industries to improve its female representation levels right from entry level to the board level.
But where should we start? Are women holding themselves back for whatever reason, not believing they can reach the unattainable in their career or are company policies to blame for not adapting quick enough to women’s concerns who may want time off to start a family and are being discriminated against if they choose to do so.
While sadly this is the case for many companies many are now waking up and adapting their policies to promote better diversity. The good news is gender equality matters to handling companies like dnata, Swissport and Menzies with all committing to IATA’s 25by25 initiative.
This means increasing the number of women in senior positions and under-represented areas by 25%, or up to a minimum of 25% by 2025.
“If we look at our board of executives, one out of five seats is female, which is equivalent to 20% and our new owners, Agility, have a female chair of the board [Henadi Al-Saleh],” said Jessica Sims, Vice President Commercial – Europe, Menzies Aviation. She was speaking as a panelist on the subject of gender equality at last year’s GHI Annual Conference.
Menzies is aiming to increase their middle leadership roles to at least 40% by 2033, which is currently at 28%, so definitely some opportunity here to improve, said Sims. “To help achieve these goals, we are participating in the United Nation’s “Target Gender Equality” accelerator programme which is available to signatories of the UN Global Compact.
As part of the Compact, we have committed to 7 Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 5 to achieve gender equality and empower women and girls.”
She stressed that the question of gender balance was becoming a real challenge for companies. “For the wider aviation industry, diversity is a massive challenge as women are very underrepresented,” she said and shared some bleak statistics.
- Just 5% of pilots are women
- 26% are air traffic controllers
- 18% are flight dispatchers
- 9% are aerospace engineers
“These figures show that aviation has a long way to go and our company is no exception. Menzies has a huge opportunity to attract more women to our organisation,” she continued.
“Typically for so long, pilots have been male because of women having to take time off, for example, for childcare and maternity leave. To look after a new born baby. It can be quite difficult for female pilots to maintain that job. If we come to our ground handling business, if you think about lifting heavy bags, heavy equipment, breaking down cargo, typically below the wing, it is a male-dominated job if you look back in history, and above the wing it is often more female-orientated, with softer skill, customer facing skills, with more flexibility with childcare.
“We see these massive trends in our business so it’s about acknowledging those trends and how we are going to change the workplace to be more family friendly. How airlines are going to be more family friendly to getting more female pilots. What’s good is that we are actively talking about it and trying to make changes and raise awareness.”
Audience member Laura Rodríguez, Manager Implementation & Quality Assurance from Cargo iQ said a lack of confidence often caused women not to go for senior positions, but agreed company policies bear a responsibility to encourage greater inclusion, especially in regards to parental leave.
She said: “If you know you are going to be taking six months off, or the manager knows you could be potentially be taking six months leave, this plays a big role in the recruiting process and that is unconscious bias that we are still fighting with. So my question is to the global organisations dealing with a variety of different policies where you are working with different levels of maternity and paternity leave whether you have an organisational policy to level the ground so that they [women] are not faced with this type of discrimination based on the country that they are based.”
Sims said as part of the UN Global Impact initiative, Menzies had to test their businesses and visited each station to understand the situation more thoroughly while taking into consideration hygiene factors and making sure places were suitable for men and women.
“For example, on the ramp we are making sure it’s not a male-dominated environment, making sure our job descriptions and recruitment ads are suitable for women as well as men and not just targeted at men. So we have started with the challenge of assessing our stations and the differences that we have seen are huge between all the different regions that we operate in. At the moment, we are growing our business significantly in the Middle East and we are paying attention to that region as well to try to raise awareness there. Some of the policies that we have in our European business we are trying to see if they are suitable for the Middle East.”
In addition, Menzies’ Chief People Officer Juliet Thomson has been to Pakistan to work on how they can improve their diversity offering in their Middle Eastern operations.
SAYGE Leadership Coach and Aviation Consultant Desiree Perez, who was also speaking on the panel, said that ‘unconscious bias’ was also a reality that we should consider and shared with the audience her own experiences in the workplace.
“There’s so much to be said about unconscious bias. The things that we don’t realise about ourselves, the perspectives that we have, the judgements that we make. But the more awareness that we can bring to ourselves on why we are making these judgements, about how we perceive and go about things, will help turn our unconscious bias,” she said.
“When I got a new job at 27 working at an airport, it was a customer relations role. People had been there for a long time and I remember walking into my colleague’s offices for the first time to meet him and he just looked at me from the top down and said I wonder how you got here and what entitles you to have this role? I don’t think he meant anything bad by it, but I was young, that was one of the biases, being young and female, I think we were under 10% in terms of women.”
Another example of unconscious bias when she was labelled by someone from HR as a ‘customer services Nazi’ due to her mixed Argentinian and German background. “85% of things that we do or our brain does are subconscious that we don’t even notice.”
Global Load Control’s Managing Director Marcus Becker who was listening to the discussion, shared at his company, they have taken decisive action to achieve 50% female targets across the board at all levels.
He said: “Sometimes we’ve dipped below that but we have taken some easy measures like ensuring a woman is always on the interview panel that addresses some of these things. With small measures like that it helps to get back on target.”
Diversity is a topic that is coming up everywhere and becoming more and more important across industries, stressed Perez. But how does aviation compare to other industries?
In preparation for the debate on equality, Sims spoke to people from the tech industry in particularly from computer company, Lenovo, to see if aviation was similar to tech in regards to diversity levels and interestingly, she found that there were not too many differences.
“They feel they have a great big gap as well and it is a male-dominated culture, which they are trying to target with educating students coming through the ranks. The woman told me 26% of student engineers is female. In the workplace, it is 30% women but only 16% in executive roles. So on behalf of Menzies we could definitely relate to those statistics and it is great they are starting to target education levels.”
Menzies has made D&I training mandatory for all of their 35,000 colleagues globally and also has launched a Women in Leadership Programme last year. It is designed to accelerate the careers of females and increase representation of females in the workforce. Women have sponsors and role models to support them with their career progression.
Sims concluded her presentation on a recent report by McKinsey & Company finding that companies with greater gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above average profitability. While profit is not as important as people and doing the right thing, to know women bring added value to organisations should remind women they can succeed at whatever level.
