A very quick duck into this thread from me. A friend pointed me in this direction regarding the exclusion of women from aviation based on a sex-related feature, ie height. The cut off in height is not there to exclude women, it is there because the harnesses we wear are made to fit a range of heights but an effective harness cannot be made to accommodate all heights. There is also a maximum height limit, and I know some women who have been frustrated by the lower height limit but I know more men who have been frustrated by the upper height limit. There are height limits too on becoming cabin crew which are based on the harness height/weight range, and this does not seem to stop many women entering the industry as cabin crew. So I agree, there is something that is hindering women from becoming pilots, but it is not (for the main part) height.
I joined the industry in a wave of female recruitment. We were told many times by other pilot cadets that we were only there because we were women and the company wanted to look good. In the year I joined there were news articles and press releases about a landmark number of women entering aviation. Nearly 40% of my intake were women, many of them not from STEM backgrounds (another misconception.) My fellow trainees included former teachers, sales reps, a nurse, a historian, a solicitor, among other non-scientific backgrounds. There were male trainees too who were also from non-STEM backgrounds, so this was not a skewing of requirements put on specially for the women.
Many of the women I trained and subsequently flown with have taken a huge interest in getting more women into flying as pilots. What we are up against is not the reluctance of companies to recruit women but the reluctance of women to apply. We do not know exactly why this is, but it is presumed to be because girls do not see women in roles such as pilot, and hence there are fewer women aspiring to do it growing up. We try to make ourselves visible to girls - I have done many talks in schools, but we are up against a tough gig when even the teachers start by expressing surprise at a female pilot.
There are challenges to being a female pilot, but they generally come from a position of employer ignorance, usually of female biology (we have teams of female pilots lobbying employers about working during phases in our lives such as breast feeding, the menopause, etc.) I have not noticed (in over 20 years of flying) exclusion of females from the profession as a result of employers not wishing to employ women.
Anyway, I don’t want to derail what seems to be a very useful debate going on here. I’m grateful to all those who campaign where they can to uphold the hard-won rights of adult human females.