Gender bias giving way as more women take off as pilots

Monica Michna says male colleagues joke that "girl power" is taking over West Mifflin's Pittsburgh Flight Training Center.

Michna, 24, became the Allegheny County Airport flight school's general manager in February. Its chief flight instructor, Chris Harper, is a woman. So is veteran instructor Erin Beccari, who also flies commercially for charter company Corporate Air. Dispatcher Jen Kimmick is one of more than a dozen female flight students at the school.

"Women are definitely more accepted in aviation today," said Michna of Pleasant Hills.

"There was bias for a while, even here. You'd run into issues with instructors categorizing women as too emotional to be good pilots, whereas men were seen as being analytical. But there's a new mentality," she said.

Statistics appear to support Michna, although male pilots still outnumber women almost 15 to 1.

Women held 42,218 of the nation's 627,588 pilot certificates -- or 6.7 percent -- in 2010, according to data released on Monday. That is up almost 18.6 percent since 2000. In the same period, the number of male certificate-holders dropped almost 1 percent.

Nowhere was the growth more pronounced than in the cockpits of commercial planes.

The number of commercial and airline transport certificates -- the equivalent of master's and doctoral degrees for aviators, respectively -- held by women increased 35 percent, from 10,218 in 2000 to 13,755 in 2010. The number of men with such certificates -- 252,148 -- dropped a half percent in the same span.

The FAA data also showed increasing numbers of women in most other fields of aviation. The number of women dispatchers soared 71.2 percent since 2000, and they hold almost one in every five dispatch jobs. There was a 22.5 percent jump in female flight instructors, but they held just 6.6 percent of the 96,473 flight instructor certificates in 2010.

Women also increased their numbers as mechanics (up 43 percent), repair workers (up 35.7 percent), parachute riggers (28.6 percent) and ground instructors (up 14.4 percent), but still comprise just single-digit percentages of workers in those fields.

More than 80 percent of flight attendants are women.

"I never knew so many women were interested in aviation. You see so few of them," said Kimmick, 20, of Baldwin Borough, the Pittsburgh Flight Training Center dispatcher who is training to become a pilot. "I thought I was unique."

Peggy Chabrian, founding president of the advocacy group Women in Aviation International, based near Dayton, Ohio, doesn't expect fields dominated by men to ever be equally split between the sexes.

"It's probably always going to be a male-dominated profession. Not that anyone is keeping anyone out," Chabrian said of piloting. "Some professions just appeal more to one gender or the other."

She'd like to see the number of women pilots continue to grow, to between 10 percent and 15 percent of the field.

About 8 percent of the students at the Pittsburgh Flight Training Center, which is affiliated with the Community College of Allegheny County, are women. About 16 percent of the students in the Community College of Beaver County's aviation program are women, and a woman, Ursula Matuszak, runs the professional pilot's program, CCBC Aviation Director Carmen "Corky" Romeo said.

Chabrian tied increases to development programs that try to spur young people's interest in aviation. For example, the Experimental Aircraft Association's Young Eagles program has taken more than 1.6 million children on free demonstration flights since 1992. A study released in March said former Young Eagles are five times more likely to become pilots than those who never participated -- and 9 percent of the ones who do are women, above the national average.

Chabrian also noted that women's roles in military aviation have grown in recent decades, helping produce more recreational and commercial airline pilots of the future. Perception has played a role, too.

"As more and more women got into the career and people got used to seeing women in a pilot's uniform and hearing their voices over the intercom on a plane, it has changed the way people think," Chabrian said.

That has steadily developed since the mid-1970s, when airlines started hiring women as pilots. McKeesport native Helen Richey had been hired by Central Airlines decades earlier, but quit after male pilots rejected her union membership.

Beccari, the Pittsburgh Flight Training Center instructor and Corporate Air pilot, never had any female role models in aviation growing up. Her father was a US Airways mechanic. Her first instructor, however, was a woman; that instructor is now a pilot for a regional airline. They talk regularly.

"It's a very professional environment, but it can be personally challenging," Beccari said.