Back in the 1960s, the head of Lufthansa's pilot training school, Alfred Vermaaten, once quipped: "A woman has a better chance of becoming a world heavyweight boxing champion than an airline captain". It took decades to prove Vermaaten wrong. Lufthansa's first female pilot took to the skies in 1988, and went on to becoming the German flag carrier's first female captain in the year 2000.
Lufthansa currently employs nearly 300 female pilots, which means women account for little more than 5 percent of the airline's pilots an industry average based on a random sampling of major commercial airlines compiled by Deutsche Welle.
Today the odds of a woman being a commercial airline pilot are better than becoming a heavyweight boxing champion, but they're still a lot lower than the 12 percent on the executive boards of Germany's major DAX companies. Furthermore, 36 percent of judges in Germany are women and nearly 40 percent of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet is female.
No discrimination in the cockpit
In Vermaaten's time, it was unthinkable for a woman to be in the cockpit of any commercial airline, even though many female pilots had flown for the military during the previous half-century.
"We had a saying that 'if God meant women to fly, he would have painted the sky pink, not blue,'" said Captain Jörg Handwerg, a spokesman for the airline pilots' association Vereinigung Cockpit. However, gender discrimination is no longer an obstacle to a career in the cockpit, he added. Quite the contrary.
"When (women) apply for a job, airlines are happy. They want to get rid of the stigma they discriminate against women. They want to encourage women to become pilots, but with only an 8 percent application rate, you cannot have 50 percent women pilots," he said.
Although there are no quotas or numerical targets in its recruitment of female pilots, Lufthansa sponsors an annual program called Girls' Day, in which companies present vocational choices to teenage girls. "We try to promote the job of an airline pilot, flight engineer or mechanic to high school girls, to show them that these kinds of career paths are options for them," explained Lufthansa spokesman Michael Lamberty.
Lack of female role models
That so few women apply for the flight training programs airlines offer is puzzling, especially since the pay is good. The starting salary at a major commercial airline such as Lufthansa is about 60,000 euros ($82,000), which is more than that of a junior hospital doctor or lower level federal judge in Germany.
First officer Rieke Hurler, 25, earned her pilot's license in 2010 after completing an in-house flight training course that lasted nearly three years. Hurler, whose father is also a pilot, had already dreamed about flying as a child.
"I think if my father would not be a pilot, I would not have even thought about it," Hurler said, adding that the lack of female role models could be a reason why so few women consider a career in the cockpit. "In the movies and TV, it's always the male heroes who are flying the airplanes".
Too technical for women?
Perhaps flying jets, like fixing cars, is simply one of those 'male' tasks which doesn't appeal to most women?
"The female pilots we have are wonderful, but women in general just don't seem to be interested in this very technical job," said Handwerg. But Hurler believes many women are frightened off by the perception that flying is a purely technical career.
"You don't need to study maths or physics to be a pilot. Lots of women think it's only a technical job, but you need communication and team skills, soft skills too," said Hurler. "I think there's no difference whether you're a woman or man flying an airplane. There's nothing that a woman can't do in this job," she added.
For many younger women, the technical demands of the job and sexism are not the primary issue keeping them away from the runway. What matters is whether a company offers family friendly policies that make it easier for women to combine work with motherhood.
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