Insights and Research on the Study of Gender and Intersectionality in International Airline Cultures by Mills Albert J.;

Author:Mills, Albert J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Masculine Hegemony and the Absence of Female Labor

Following First World War, a number of small commercial airlines began operation in the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that over 25,000 women had served in a range of capacities in the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) and tens of thousands of women had served in the aircraft construction industries during the war, less than a handful of women were employed in any of the new airline companies. Two women were employed in minor clerical roles in 1919–1920, both leaving upon marriage. A third woman was employed as a secretary in 1922; a widow, she went on to serve the airline for many years.

In 1937 when TCA was founded it was not unusual for women to be employed in the airline industry, albeit in a limited range of jobs. Nonetheless, the new airline was in operation for 14 months before it employed its first female employees—two flight attendants or “stewardesses.” A third stewardess was employed later that year. These three women constituted less than 1% of the airline’s 332 employees.

In both airlines the absence of women can be explained in large part by male dominance of the industry and gender notions that went far beyond the airlines at the respective points of time. Nonetheless, these explanations are circular and reductive; failing to explain how certain beliefs develop and get translated into action. As Connell (1995) has argued, we need to analyze relations of domination and subordination among different masculinities (Glenn, 1999: 28). Connell (1995) uses the term “hegemonic masculinity” to describe “a particular idealized image of masculinity in relation to which images of femininity and other masculinities are marginalized and subordinated” (Barrett, 1996, p. 130).

At the 1919 predecessor airlines of BOAC, we find a dominance of wartime air force leaders and personnel coupled with a wartime ethos that was reproduced and reinforced through organizational symbolism and camaraderie. Within the airlines the owners were businessmen who had played important wartime roles in building and supplying military aircraft. They employed their senior and middle managers, chief pilots, and chief accountants from the ranks of the military officer class. Below them came the pilots and engineers who almost exclusively came from the ranks of the wartime air forces. Not unexpectedly many of the men knew each other, having served together in the war.

Within the airlines there was little to prevent the reproduction of wartime camaraderie and beliefs. Commercial aviation was a brand new industry that relied heavily on aviation experience and skills. In 1919 men with air force experience had a near monopoly on those skills, and thus, unsurprisingly, constituted the great majority of the workforce in commercial aviation. Drawing on Acker’s (1992b) work on gendered processes, it is clear that the gendered division of labor owed much in the first place to wartime practices which excluded women from all but the WRAF, and even there they were excluded from combat and a range of associated roles. That this practice was reproduced is in large part

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