The pilot and the flight attendant: Aviation's gendered performance tropes

Abstract

This paper uses a feminist poststructuralist approach to investigate how gender stereotyping and biases lead to the underrepresentation of women within the more prestigious and better-paid technical and operational sectors of the aviation industry. Sociocultural constructs of ideologies about gendered performances are deeply ingrained in men and women both in the industry and the society they live in; thus, the individual agents as well as the structures are accomplices in maintaining gendered tropes of the pilot and the flight attendant. Focusing the fieldwork on Austria as a non-Anglosphere Western society where aviation does not have a strong history or presence helps to contextualize gender disparity as a phenomenon intrinsic to the global industry. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic explorations with participants from various sectors of Austrian aviation, added to my own lived experiences as a female pilot, my aim is to open aviation's Black Box to reveal the day-to-day behaviors that create, support, and sustain gender-based inequalities globally beyond the Anglosphere. I emphasize the powerful beliefs about appropriate gendered performances that are both pervasive in society and deeply embedded within the division between operational and customer service occupations, impacting career progression and communicative norms in ways that help reproduce inequalities.