We need more women....

[zico]

What kind of people are "feisty" and "bossy"?
Here's a clue. Only one Supreme Court judge was described as feisty, and only one PM in the last 20 years was described as bossy.

[Slarti]

I was once involved in writing one of the Dummies textbooks, and I ran into an editor who always (but always!) used "she" rather than "he" when talking about somebody whose gender wasn't specified.

So use gender neutral pronouns like them/they.

It avoids confusion when referring to someone who is themselves confused and may be Simon one day and Simone the next.


Slarti

[Rhyd6]

Overheard when we were out to lunch today - a foursome at a nearby table were discussing gender definitions and the fact that you could now pick and choose when one of the chaps announced that he'd read recently that one of the students union at Oxford had decreed that instead of using he/she we should all use "ze" so's not to cause distress to those whose sexuality was causing them confusion. His companion remarked morosely "God Almighty ze - ze we'll all end up sounding like demented French men".

Now zere's a thought.

R6

[UncleEbenezer]

Overheard when we were out to lunch today - a foursome at a nearby table were discussing gender definitions and the fact that you could now pick and choose when one of the chaps announced that he'd read recently that one of the students union at Oxford had decreed that instead of using he/she we should all use "ze" so's not to cause distress to those whose sexuality was causing them confusion. His companion remarked morosely "God Almighty ze - ze we'll all end up sounding like demented French men".

Now zere's a thought.

R6

In my youth, we still had the vestiges of gender in English. So for example a ship was still "she". But when the gendered pronouns are associated with the sexes, it sounded archaic to apply them to inanimate objects (and still more when applied to an animal of the opposite sex). It takes the perspective of a language that still has gender to see how it can be perfectly normal to be female but masculine.

If people want to eliminate the last remains of gender from our language, we already have a perfectly good ungendered pronoun.

[bungeejumper]

It takes the perspective of a language that still has gender to see how it can be perfectly normal to be female but masculine.

Indeed. In German, a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter, but I don't think you'd find many people referring to her as "it". Whereas a car can be either masculine or neuter, depending on your choice of noun. Never female, unlike in France.

What does all that tell us? Not a lot.

BJ

[Diziet]

It isn't very satisfactory to simply dismiss the struggle that me have in recognising something as being an innate inability to see gender bias. "It's there but you can't see it because you're a man" s a self-fulfilling argument that I don't buy I'm afraid.

It is of course possible to see blatant bias, and it is possible to see less blatant bias, but when the bias does not affect you, it simply takes more effort to recognize, and it means getting our of one' comfort zone.

To relate a personal experience, I am a white woman and I consider myself reasonably racially aware. I was, however, shocked at the everyday racism that a black female friend of mine faced, when we were chatting over coffee one day. I never ever experienced the casual everyday racial abuse that she described and had only very rarely seen it happen in front of me. She did not say 'It's there but you don't see it because you are white' but this is exactly what was happening. I hope I am a bit more aware now, but I expect I am still missing a lot that is outside my experience. It is something that is addressable, but only if one accepts that who we are dictates what we experience, and dismissing other people's experience does not make these experiences invalid.

[Diziet]

One of the principal reasons (wouldn't you just know it?) is that pregnancy is virtual death to an airline licence. If you ever go more than six/nine months or so without flying, your licence automatically lapses. (A slight oversimplification - you can always go back to school and retrain - but bear with me.) So what's an airline to do? After all, the lapsing rule is there to protect the travelling public from out-of-practice pilots. Whereas the demands of motherhood make it damn-near impossible to fit an intercontinental day-shift into the daily cut and thrust of getting the kids to the crèche and back again.

Oh, certainly, there are women who have no familial intentions at all, and who may very well make excellent pilots, but who never get the chance because the airlines aren't prepared to gamble a couple of million on their reproductive outcomes. I can see both points of view, can't you?

The idea that women pilots are only those without children is incorrect, at least based on the women who fly Aer Lingus planes http://www.independent.ie/life/up-in-th ... 82965.html

BA does not seem to have a problem with women pilots who have children either http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/ ... le-pilots/

So it does not seem that pregnancy is 'death to an airline license'. But stereotypes are certainly incredibly strong and take a long time to change. I don't think many passengers would walk out of a plane flown by a woman, so i don't expect that it is passenger feedback that is the problem; it is more likely to be training and hiring bias, and (even strongest of all) the perception that it is not a career that is open to women, so few women apply.

And by the way, ferrying kids to the creche is not by definition the job of mothers.

[bungeejumper]

So it does not seem that pregnancy is 'death to an airline license'. But stereotypes are certainly incredibly strong and take a long time to change. I don't think many passengers would walk out of a plane flown by a woman, so i don't expect that it is passenger feedback that is the problem; it is more likely to be training and hiring bias, and (even strongest of all) the perception that it is not a career that is open to women, so few women apply.

It would be nice to think that it was all down to negative stereotypes, as you say, which could be easily changed - at least in little Britain. (Which, let's remember, is only one of 200-odd countries which run airlines. You might have noticed that I was talking about worldwide, not just in our little corner?)

We enlightened types can rant as much as we like about how much the rest of the world needs to change its bone-headed medieval attitude toward women pilots, but if you're an airline that's going to be touching down in Kampala or Karachi you'd be crazy not to acknowledge that people simply won't get on your plane, and you can't make them change their minds. The economics of it are going to become a problem pretty damn quickly.

And so to your equally heartfelt beef about the problems of licences lapsing when pilots take a sabbatical from flying. The very sad truth is that they do - under IATA rules, I believe - and that there'd be very little that little old England could do to change the rules even if it wanted to. I've discussed all this at length with one of my oldest friends who's a senior BA pilot - in fact, he used to be the test pilot who took all new 747s up over the Atlantic and turned all the engines off just to make sure that they glided properly and fired up again successfully - and he confirmed both the prohibitive employment maths and the teeth-gnashing fact that most female pilots do indeed jack it in too quickly to make them really viable as likely prospects for the employers. I'd personally doubt that they're jumping ship because of institutional sexism within British Airways, but I'm sure I wouldn't know. I don't fly much, but I can only ever recall one female pilot, on an EasyJet to Amsterdam. Maybe I need to get out more?

And by the way, ferrying kids to the creche is not by definition the job of mothers.

Agreed, certainly not. I do the job myself sometimes. But I look out of my window often enough to notice that 90% of the kids being dropped off at our local school are being driven there by their mothers. Whatever we might think of it, the generalisation holds. What we decide to do with it, factually correct as it is, is where our arguments will stand or fall.

BJ

[melonfool]

The most casually sexist items on Radio 4 are generally found in Women's Hour... often my jaw drops at the blatant stereotyping of men that the loathsome liberals put up with

I do love those racial monitoring forms. There is a certain frisson of the Third Reich about them, such papers were so helpful in tagging folks for targeting for future genocide. Of course we would never use your data for that purpose, until they do, and you are riding a cattle car to Auschwitz because you are deemed an Untermensch. There can be no good purpose asking your ethnicity other than to discriminate.

Thus I always gleefully claim African descent: it's what evolutionary science tells us. My direct ancestors may have ended up in the Pink marshmallows end of the Welsh Valleys, but the Rift Valley is really home....

Godwin.

Mel

[redsturgeon]

Godwin.

Mel

Mr or Mrs (or Ms)

John

[melonfool]

Godwin.

Mel

Mr or Mrs (or Ms)

John

Mx



Mel

[Instep]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Quick. Lock this topic!