Piloting is stubbornly monolithic: About 95 percent of airline pilots in the U.S. today are male. Nearly as many are white.
As air travel became more popular in the 1970s and 1980s, airline advertisements almost exclusively depicted pilots as white men, implying technical competence being only found with that type of person.
Historically, the armed forces offered a less-expensive path into the field. But the military has long struggled with pilot diversity and shortages, too.
Airlines have started to do more to diversify. United recently launched a flight school with the aim of hiring thousands of pilots in the years ahead, at least half of them women or people of color. Other carriers have launched similar initiatives, too. The goal is to staff up to meet the industry’s aspirations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/business/pilots-diversity.html
