Wanted: Female Pilots in China

India has the world’s highest proportion of female commercial pilots, at 12 percent.
China’s proportion of female pilots – at 1.3 percent - is one of the world’s lowest, which analysts and pilots attribute to social perceptions and male-centric hiring practices by Chinese airlines.

But Chinese airlines are struggling with an acute pilot shortage amid surging travel demand, and female pilots are drawing attention to the gender imbalance.

Although Chinese women had been trained as military pilots since 1949, no women had been trained to fly commercial flights.  For example, China’s Civil Aviation Flight College did not accept women for helicopter training until 2009.

Chinese carriers will need 128,000 new pilots over the next two decades, according to forecasts by planemaker Boeing Co.  The shortfall has so far prompted airlines to aggressively hire foreign captains and Chinese regulators to relax physical entry requirements for cadets.

“The mission is to start cutting down the thorns that cover this road, to make it easier for those who come after us,” said Chen Jingxian, a Shanghai-based lawyer who learned to fly in the United States and is among those urging change.

Such issues are not confined to China. The proportion of female pilots in South Korea and Japan, where such jobs do not conform to widespread gender stereotypes, is also less than 3 percent.

But in China, female pilots strain to hold up half the sky. The strongest calls for change are coming mostly from Chinese female pilots, thanks to a slew of returnees who learned how to fly while living abroad in countries such as the United States.

Read the whole story by Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-airshow-women-pilots/in-china-female-pilots-strain-to-hold-up-half-the-sky-idUSKCN1NA2SP


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