Teaching Women to Fly Archives

Did you know that March is Women’s History Month, and that Women of Aviation Worldwide Week started March 5? I didn’t, until a friend shared an e-mail from Penny Hamilton, a pilot with a Ph.D. who’s invested a lot of time studying just about every aspect of Teaching Women to Fly.

If you don’t remember her work, take another look at my post from January 2, 2011, Women & Aviation: Still No Real Change. Things, as most will agree, have not gotten any better since then. (And beyond aviation, of late they have taken another turn for the worse.)

But she and others haven’t quit. In Denver on March 1 Dr. Penny and her research partner, Dr. Marie-Line Germain of Western Carolina University, presented their full research and theory paper at the 2012 Academy of Human Resource Development International Research Conference in the Americas.

Their paper, “Women Employed in Male-Dominated Industries: Lessons Learned from Female Aircraft Pilots, Pilots-in-training and Mixed-gender Flight Instructors,” focuses on problems of exclusion, male-dominated industries, and rethinking human resources development.

During this week, Women of Aviation offers a plethora of activities and contests designed to get females of all ages involved. More important to me is that it welcomes the participation of anyone who believes that aviation would be better off with more women involved, and each one of us can make a difference.

I’ll take that one step further. For the most part, we men haven’t done a very good job of nurturing the pilot population (or the nation). Maybe now is the time to step aside and give women a chance. They certainly can’t do any worse than we have. — Scott Spangler

Technorati Tags: Pilot Population,Women of Aviation,Women’s History Month,Teaching Women to Fly

As part of the conversation on the AOPA survey on why students drop out of aviation, we got an e-mail from Dr. Penny Rafferty Hamilton, Ph.D. She had recently completed a two-year research project that led to Teaching Women to Fly, which shares the results.

And they are depressing.

What makes them such a downer is not just the scarcity of female pilots, who are just 6 percent of the pilot population. It’s that their numbers have not grown, despite 20 years of trying by Women in Aviation International and other groups and individuals.

Like the dropout rate, this static, single-digit aviation participation by roughly half the population is another indictment against the industry’s rep of being innovative and forward looking, forward thinking, and forward acting. It is further evidence that aviation tradition is impeding its progress.