The thread about the girl flying around the world got me wondering why people are so concerned about percentages of men and women in certain fields, particularly percentage of women involved. It seems like it is more important to people that the percentages be as near to equal as possible instead of having the different fields (aviation, etc.) open to anyone who wishes to pursue them. If it's really important for percentages to be equal in "traditionally male-dominated" fields, why isn't it important that female-dominated fields have balanced percentages? Why don't we have campaigns so men know that they can become nurses? After all, less than 10% of nurses are male. Or teachers or librarians or speech therapists? I'm all for careers being open to everyone, but just don't understand the fixation on percentages.
Percentages are BS, and meaningless. But it's good that you feel the way that you do about this topic. Normalization is great. But, many women have gone through a lot of aggravation to break into male dominated vocations. It's pretty normal to see women in areas that even twenty years ago they were marginalized by male coworkers. My wife is an engineer who went through a bunch of BS when she was hired in the mid 80s as a young engineer out of school. We have many friends who experienced the same type of BS, specifically, "why aren't you at home raising a family?" and " by taking this job you are putting a guy who has a family to provide for out of work." Cat calls and rude comments were also pretty prevalent. You would expect men to support and cheer on women who do things that previously only a rare few women have done, but there are a lot of peckerhead males out there who for what ever reason, feel the need to denigrate or marginalize. I tell my now in their 20s daughters all the time that they can do whatever they want in this world and don't ever let anyone bully you in the workplace.
Most men are real men and are not threatened by females in aviation. Unfortunately, like any other industry, there are peckerheads out there, who get a charge out of making others, especially it seems, women, feel terrible. There is a youtuber, Nancy Bradshaw, who posted a video a few months ago, about leaving a job as a 747 pilot, because she ran into a couple of these male peckerheads while in the cockpit. She described in general what they said to her, and she left the job. I went back to the channel to try and find the video to post here, but I couldn't find it. Either it's there or she took it down. If she took it down, I hope it's because someone convinced her to take action against the peckerheads.
I hope you never run into that type of BS in your life, but if you do, don't take it, fight back. My wife did, fortunately for her it nipped it in the bud by letting them know she wouldn't put up with it, peckerheads are usually cowards.
