To-day, nobody bats an eye at the sight of a four-striper with long blond hair and lipstick hauling her flight case like her male colleagues do. Even an all female crew in the front office is commonplace these days. A female voice on the control frequency is also quite normal now in most of the world. But this was not always so and in some countries the going was more difficult than in others.
Even after female pilots on commercial flights were no longer a rarity, public reservations resulted in Air Inter telling the passengers of its Paris-Nimes flight on 7 February 1985 that it had been operated by an all female crew… only after they landed! This was a historic event, an absolute first in France.
Perhaps the most convoluted story comes from Hungary where girls had to put up a fierce fight to be allowed a shot at the microphone in international ATC service.
Back in the 70s and 80s Hungarian labor law had a list of professions that were not open to women. These concerned mainly work requiring a lot of physical strength but for some reason, “air traffic controller” was also among them. When asked why this should be so, some kind of weird explanation was given about women having fewer red blood cells that effectively prevented them from working in ATC. The fact that women in other countries were getting licensed and worked to everyone’s satisfaction did not seem to change anything. Hungarian women, apparently, were different…
There were a few of us, licensed controllers, who did not really understand why gals were banned from the job we were doing. Others thought this was just as well and they basked in the macho feeling of male superiority. Our bosses were also divided and some of them tended to blow up if we as much as broached the subject. Others were more sympathetic but thought the subject was not important enough to put on the agenda.
But the girls did not give up! They collected examples from other countries, looked for legal precedents and dug deep into the origins of this silly rule that prevented them from doing what they wanted to do so very much, controlling airplanes.
By the late 1970s the no-girls policy was becoming clearly untenable and we did manage to convert a few influential managers to supporters of female controllers. But officially still nothing seemed to move.
In the end, the final decisive change was engineered by three girls who were allowed to attend the controller course and also to take the license exam when they finished. In fact it was the husband of one of them who provided the proverbial straw that broke the previous system. He was a well respected aviator, chief pilot of the flying outfit he worked at and his good ministry at all the right places brought fruit in the end. His wife and two others were on their way towards becoming controllers.
Considering the system in Hungary as it was back then, one could be excused for thinking that the husband’s influence was on the political level. But nothing could be further from the truth! He did pull all the right strings but those were professional contacts, people who were sympathetic to the girls’ cause but otherwise had nothing to do with politics.
But politics did get in on the act in a big way and resulted in the sudden death of one of the girls’ dreams. As luck would have it, after her husband had turned the cards in their favor and the girls started the ATC school, in the end it was his wife who was prevented from taking the ATC exams. Here is how it happened. Back then Hungarians needed an exit visa to travel to the West. The length of time for such absence was strictly limited and if you over stayed or worse, decided not to go back, there was hell to pay. By the 80’s it was not so that your earthly goods were confiscated by the State if you or a relative “defected” but consequences could still be dire. Even if the State as such no longer used its heavy hand, overzealous officials on lower levels could still make life miserable. When their daughter left the country to join the guy she had fallen in love with, it was exactly such an overzealous official who determined that this aspirant air traffic controller was no longer trustworthy and as such, should not be given the chance to get an ATCO license.
This was a major blow and she left the course, and aviation, forever, taking her dreams with her. Did the fact that she was a woman play a role? Would a guy have received a more lenient treatment? It is hard to say now and those who could answer the question have flown west many years ago. But one cannot discard the suspicion… One thing is sure. While the girls were allowed to attend the ATC course but had to work also, some of the guys were given a dispensation from normal work for the duration of the course.
How did female controllers fare? Most of them stayed the course, others changed to different jobs both inside and outside aviation but one thing was sure: they performed as well or sometimes better than their male colleagues, setting the basis for to-day’s reality: a four striper in skirt or a female voice on the control frequency is normal… as indeed it should be.
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