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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

I don't believe that women earn 75% less than men at a certain airline.

308 replies

Gromance02 · 04/04/2018 10:02

I just don't. Unless they are talking about completely different roles. Eg, pilots (generally men) compared to air stewards (generally women). I'm not defending the airline but I don't think they deserve this utterly misleading headline.

Obviously if a female pilot with exactly the same length of career with the same number of sabbatical/maternity/paternity leave as a man is on less than her male counterpart, that is wrong.

OP posts:
LimonViola · 06/04/2018 15:50

Morphene, I am astounded at the bollocks you're throwing at this thread!

If you genuinely believe that flying a plane is so simple to train for and no more demanding than being cabin crew, I genuinely don't know what to say to you! 😂

Morphene · 06/04/2018 15:57

I don't think trained monkeys could do your job, or mine, or be cabin crew.

It isn't doing a job down to say that you don't need to use maths every day in it Confused

I've already said that automation is making the job of professional scientist less and less intense and the existence of the internet means there is very little value in specific knowledge anymore.

Computers/robots are going to continue to take the skill out of all sorts of jobs that used to be extremely demanding on the humans that did them...its not anyone's fault!

Morphene · 06/04/2018 16:04

as for why aren't many more people doing it...maybe because the training is long and expensive...

its probably not going to remain long and expensive for much longer though.

We all need to prepare ourselves for a world where service jobs are the only ones that aren't better done by robots...

then maybe the cabin crew will be earning 10 times what the pilots get.

(and the nurses will be earning 10 times what the scientists get).

Morphene · 06/04/2018 16:07

to bring this back to the point of the thread - no matter how much maths you know, its not clear to me that anybody's hour of work is worth 10 times that of anyone else's.

IF we stopped pretending all those 'oh look at me I'm so crucial' male middle managers are actually contributing more to society than the poor women working 3 cleaning jobs we wouldn't have a gender pay gap.

ps. box I will love you for ever if you will divulge what they taught you in flight school about the relationship between the shape of a wing and lift....

Rufustherenegadereindeer1 · 06/04/2018 16:30

box

I completely agree

Buuuut...quick question Grin

Dd is goodish at science...she is fucking awesome at PE science because she completely and utterly gets it

Would you say that someone who enjoyed the physics of flying would be good at it whether they had an A level

Does that make sense?

(Not saying for one single second that they shouldnt have the A level...just interested)

Rufustherenegadereindeer1 · 06/04/2018 16:31

I really dont know if you want morphene to love you forever Grin

Im not sure what you would gain from that Grin

Morphene · 06/04/2018 17:04

I'm hurt....Grin

Morphene · 06/04/2018 17:04

I'm just really curious to know if they get the 'air has to go faster over the top because its a longer distance' or not....

Rufustherenegadereindeer1 · 06/04/2018 17:05

morphene

Harsh but fair i feel Grin

Thanks
backinthebox · 06/04/2018 18:29

Morphene, I can see what you are doing there - you’d like me to tell you (a physicist, I believe) that the flying schools are teaching the incorrect theory so that you can have a little sneer. I’m not sufficiently in need of your never-ending love to even begin to engage with you on that subject. You have a PhD in the subject, I will not win any debate with you on your specialist subject.

I’ll ask you again, what experience do you have in flying that gives you such a great understanding of the job? It’s unlikely that you’ve seen it first hand - the cockpit door was locked to the public 17 years ago after 9/11 - yes, that’s right, I have to sit behind a bulletproof door because someone might try to kill me at work and if I die so will the other couple of hundred people I’m responsible for, and possibly thousands more on the ground below. Why is that working environment not worth reasonable payment?

And I can say it till I am blue in the face, but we do use maths all the time. Often little more than a mental calculation of rate of descent or velocity calculations, but to say a computer does it all is incorrect.

I do agree that cabin crew should be paid more, but even a cursory glance here on mumsnet will throw up hundreds of threads discussing the best way to get cheap flights.

Littleoakhorn · 06/04/2018 19:38

Often a job needs a certain level of knowledge not for the everyday but for when the shit really hits the fan. For pilots their mental model of the aircraft and what precisely it is doing this time is based on the education and training they have received. Simple really.

As for the pay gap between cabin crew and pilots, I think that the job cabin crew do and the roles they are trained for are undervalued. I remember an emergency evacuation on the runway at Gatwick where a passenger smugly told the press that the cabin crew were “really panicking and screaming at the passengers” to get out of the plane. The truth was that they were taking no chances and doing precisely what they’d been trained to do in shouting loudly at the passengers. Typical sexist assumption from the passenger, not helped by the “trolley dolly” image promoted by the airline’s marketing department.

Heinzbeancounter · 06/04/2018 22:04

I think I met Morphene 12 years ago at BA pilot selection day - definitely was chatting to a very odd physicist type, who stood out a mile as not being "the type" and needless to say didn't get the job Easter Biscuit

Polarbearflavour · 06/04/2018 22:11

I wouldn’t say cabin crew is a low paid job. A few years ago I was on 30k plus benefits. Around 9k more than an NHS nurse at the time...

Morphene · 07/04/2018 19:50

ohh...so in people's imaginations i'm a jilted would be pilot now...

Sadly not, I absolutely hate everything about flying. 140K a year wouldn't be nearly enough to persuade me to fly a plane professionally.

box believe it or not, it wasn't for sneering purposes that I asked. I was really interested to find out what level they DO go into fluid dynamics with training pilots. The fact you suspect the answer would expose you to ridicule in some way, only confirms what I was saying earlier in the thread. You DONT need a physics background to fly a plane. There is really no reason you would.

And of course my point on this thread has been that even if being a pilot required a a degree in maths and a PhD in physics it still wouldn't mean it was work that should be paid at 10 times the rate for cabin crew.

Morphene · 07/04/2018 19:53

little see that's exactly where I'm coming from. Both pilots and crew have so much training that they don't deploy daily but which they would BOTH be needed to pull out in an emergency. tbh I feel the crew have more to do in most survivable emergencies than the pilots.

They are surely undervalued.

Heinzbeancounter · 07/04/2018 20:17

Morphene trust me, if the pilot stacks it in, the cabin crew are first on the scene of the accident. That's why we are paid the big bucks. Now get back to your cave & stay there

Morphene · 09/04/2018 10:55

you get paid more because you can cause the biggest accident?

I wonder how much they pay the cleaners in nuclear reactors...misplaced mop could lead to the apocalypse.

sirfredfredgeorge · 09/04/2018 12:36

I wonder how much they pay the cleaners in nuclear reactors...misplaced mop could lead to the apocalypse.

Not sure actually need to mop the inside of a nuclear reactor, so if there are cleaners in there, surely we needed to pay the risk assessors more.

As for payment for avoiding the apocalypse, we'd better get some more money to the Pope, surely he's best placed?

Morphene · 09/04/2018 13:43

I was more thinking of leaning it on the wrong part of the control panel...if anyone is mopping inside the reactor than I hope its a robot!

RoadToRivendell · 09/04/2018 14:01

And of course my point on this thread has been that even if being a pilot required a a degree in maths and a PhD in physics it still wouldn't mean it was work that should be paid at 10 times the rate for cabin crew.

Your point is irrelevant - 'should' doesn't enter into it. It's about scarcity of skills.

Morphene · 09/04/2018 23:57

Pilot skills are really not scarce though are they? The hardest part is wanting to do a job that would take you away from home so much...and the cabin crew have the same rough deal on that one...

oh and having the cash to train of course...but we should definitely be rewarding people for starting life with additional cash resources...that's obviously totally fair.

LimonViola · 10/04/2018 05:46

How many qualified pilots are there in this, or any other country?

How many cleaners are there?

TaytoAllDay · 10/04/2018 06:28

Pilots & Cabin Crew do not work the same hours, actually Cabin Crew are expected to work more hours per month with less days off. The Cabin Crew job is more strenuous physically & takes it's toll on you.

I know this being ex-Cabin Crew, with many Pilots laughing and being shocked at how many more hours we do. It's crazy! I didn't work for RyanAir I worked in the Middle East though, but it's pretty much the same concept. Women are definitely more so in lower paid jobs and expected to be. Even when my old company was hiring they wouldn't want to hire too many males. Maybe about 5% of the time. It's just how it is.

It's sad that there are still such low expectations of women.

LimonViola · 10/04/2018 06:30

Pilots & Cabin Crew do not work the same hours, actually Cabin Crew are expected to work more hours per month with less days off.

I suspect that's to do with regulations in place to try and ensure the people who have control of the plane aren't mentally exhausted, which leads to mistakes and potentially lethal crashes? Whereas cabin crew being overtired doesn't have quite the same risks attached (unless there's an emergency situation, in which case adrenaline would kick in).

TaytoAllDay · 10/04/2018 06:30

I think reading through this, that people expect Pilots to be intelligent. You don't have to be intelligent to be a Pilot. One of my friends boasts all of the time about how he was never expected to go anywhere after school, doesn't have brains & then just decided he wanted to become a pilot & put the money into becoming one. Simply because he watched Catch me if you can lol and decided it was for him.

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