[Bath_VIP]

I am hoping some industry insiders would be able to spare some time to give me some ballpark figures for pilot pay and cabin crew pay for UK based staff. I don’t need precise numbers, something like “pilots earn 8 times what cabin crew get” would be sufficient.

I have mentioned gender pay gaps in the past and I am giving a talk in December where I want to make the distinction between industries where closing the gender pay gap is feasible through employer & industry led initiatives & those industries where the gap will only be closed with major changes in social attitudes.

I see the Airline as an example of the latter since the pay gap is heavily influenced by the relative gender balance of pilots (very male dominated) and cabin crew (mostly female dominated). Until the gender balance is the same for both pilots and cabin crew, an airline will not be able to close their gender pay gap. Given that the pipeline for new pilots remains very male dominated, I do not see anything changing in the next 10 year or so.

One way you can eliminate the gender pay gap is to pay cabin crew and pilots the same. Obviously that’s not going to happen but I want to demonstrate how the size of a gender pay gap varies according to the pay ratio of pilots & cabin crew hence my request for data for UK based staff.

Thank you in advance. If you are interested in gender pay gaps in general, you can read one of my blog posts “7 ways to misuse gender pay gap data” where I use Ryanair as an example to illustrate point number 5.

Pay Gaps #1 – 7 ways to misuse gender pay gap data

[rferguson]

At BA it would depend very much on a) what contract the cabin crew are on and b) how senior the pilot is.

On the ‘legacy’ contract at BA ,the majority of which are female, many are the main bread winners in their households taking home more than their male partners.

In terms of the pay gap between pilots and cabin crew it’s highly variable. A new recruit First Officer say on the Airbus will likely take home roughly 1.2-1.5% a legacy Cabin Crew. Obviously as their service goes on and they climb the scale to Captain the gap widens and they will take home around 3 x the average legacy crew members pay. That would be an ‘average’. If you were to take a senior training captain versus a Mixed Fleet or LGW new recruit the difference would likely be 6-7 x.

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Swissdiver, EU_Flyer

[EU_Flyer]

[quote quote=976384]One way you can eliminate the gender pay gap is to pay cabin crew and pilots the same[/quote]

Your post is curious, not least because it appears to address pay gaps not on gender but on job description. Female cabin crew don’t get paid less than pilots simply because they’re women? Nor are all cabin crew woman, nor all pilots male. Surely the test is to compare gender within the same job description and/or contract? Does a 20 years female Captain earn the same as a 20 years male Captain on the 777 for example. Same for cabin crew.

Am I missing something?

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DerekVH, cwoodward, GrahamC, biguli76

[Bath_VIP]

EU_Flyer,

I hope you don’t mind me checking your understanding of the term “gender pay gap”. There is much confusion about this and you would be in the majority if you have misunderstood.

When you compare a man and a woman who are doing exactly the same job (e.g. Senior First Officer), it is illegal to pay them differently on the grounds of their gender or on some other factor that is deemed “indissociable” from gender. This is known as Equal Pay and when this is violated we have a situation known as Unequal Pay. It is legitimate to pay them differently on some other factor such as length of service, etc, provided you can prove that these factors are not proxies for gender.

The gender pay gap has nothing to do with this as I explain in points 1 & 3 of my link. It is simply a comparison between the hourly pay of the average man and the average woman in an organisation. Us statisticians prefer to compare the median man with the median woman since averages can be distorted by a CEO earning megabucks. So if in a certain airline, the majority of men work as pilots whilst the majority of women work as cabin crew, then the median man will be a pilot and the median woman will be cabin crew at which point the official gender pay gap measure becomes determined by the pay ratio of pilots to cabin crew hence my question.

When you put it like this, you can see how imperfect the gender pay gap measure is as a single statistic. But it does point the way forward as to how the gap is closed. If more men become cabin crew and more women become pilots, then the median man and median woman will converge. The way I prefer to visualise this is to ask what % of pilots are female and what % of cabin crew are female. If these are the same (whether it’s 10%, 50% or 90%) the gender pay gap should be zero. If they are not, you will have a large gap determined by the pay ratio.

My point about airlines is that pilots are overwhelmingly male compared to cabin crew who are mostly female. Therefore the difference in the gender balances of male & female is enormous and is not likely to change in the next 10 years or so when you look at the pipeline.

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EU_Flyer

[canucklad]

It’s interesting that your focus is aircraft based and not the whole infrastructure of the airline.

Wouldn’t it be more relevant to remove the pilots from the equation as , regardless of gender they are (especially in the legacy carriers ) disproportionately paid more than the majority of employees at the airline.

Collectively , I’d be more interested in the gender gap within an airline that included the majority (statistically the mean) and also took into account those employees that work for outsourcers such as Gate Gourmet and Swissport .

Which you could argue are indirectly being exploited by the airlines in their drive to cut wage costs ?

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EU_Flyer

[Bath_VIP]

Canucklad,

You’ve touched on the other way to close a gender pay gap for an airline namely, drown the pilots & cabin crew with lots of additional employees.

Without pilots, there is no airline by definition! As I said in my link, the 3 key groups of employees you must have for an airline are pilots to fly the planes, cabin crew to look after the passengers and engineers to look after the planes. Every other employee at an airline is a cost that has to justify their existence through the value they add to these 3 groups.

Ryanair of course are the extreme example of that philosophy but the same goes for all airlines. In Ryanair’s case, because they are an Irish airline, the UK business only employs pilots & cabin crew since all other employees are based outside the UK. As a result they have one of the largest pay gaps due to the pay ratio issue I am talking about.

British Airways on the other hand have a smaller pay gap because they have a lot of padding from other employees which masks the fundamental pilot/cabin crew issue.

So if Ryanair start to get a lot of flack over their pay gap, they can narrow their gap by adding non-core employees or even simpler, transfer staff from Ireland to Northern Ireland.

At the same time, British Airways might decide they have too much padding and decide to downsize/outsource non-core staff. The effect will be to increase their gender pay gap at which point they get it in the neck.

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