Absent Aviators

Gender Issues in Aviation

Donna Bridges, Jane Neal-Smith, Albert Mills, Albert Mills, Jane Neal-Smith, Donna Bridges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317186007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Aviazione

The objective of this book is to present a number of related chapters on the subject of gender issues in the workplace of the aviation industry. More specifically, the chapters address the continuing shortfall in the number of women pilots in both civilian and military aviation. Considerable research has been carried out on gender issues in the workplace and, for example, women represent about 10% of employees in engineering. This example is often used to show that the consequences of gender discrimination are embedded and difficult to overcome in masculine-dominated occupations. However, women represent only 5-6% of the profession of pilot. Clearly there are many factors which mitigate women seeking to become pilots. The chapters within this volume raise both theoretical and practical issues, endeavouring to address the imbalance of women pilots in this occupation. Absent Aviators consolidates a diverse range of issues from a number of authors from Australia, Austria, the United States, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Each of the chapters is research-based and aims to present a broad picture of gender issues in aviation, gendered workplaces and sociology, underpinned by sound theoretical perspectives and methodologies. One chapter additionally raises issues on the historical exclusion of race from an airline. The book will prove to be a valuable contribution to the debates on women in masculine-oriented occupations and a practical guide for the aviation industry to help overcome the looming shortfall of pilots. It is also hoped it will directly encourage young women to identify and overcome the barriers to becoming a civilian or military pilot.

PART I
Identifying Gender Issues in Piloting

Chapter 1
The Junctures of Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Nationality and the Making of Pan American Airways, 1929–89

Heidi Weigand, Shannon R. Webb, Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills

Introduction

Underpinning the arguments here is the acknowledgement that the social differentiations under consideration (gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age) do not create homogenous groups … It has now become clear … that there is no longer, if ever, a uniform story of blanket disadvantage for any of these groups. Therefore, it is timely to acknowledge, confront, and deal with the actual problems of separate and relative deprivation, and sometimes conflicting experiences and interests, both between different categories of disadvantage and even within these categories themselves. (Bagilhole, 2010, emphasis added)

In 2005 McCall argued that ‘despite the emergence of intersectionality as a major paradigm of research in women’s studies and elsewhere, there has been little discussion of how to study intersectionality, that is, of its methodology’ (p. 1771, emphasis in original). McCall then went on to outline three methodological approaches – anticategorial complexity, intrasectionality and intersectionality. Five years later, Bagilhole (2010, p. 270) repeated the point, arguing that despite its theoretical contribution to our understandings of discrimination, ‘there has been little discussion of how it might be operationalized’. To that end, Bagilhole, drawing on McCall’s three methods, ‘set out to consider and analyse its [intersectionality theory] utility as an approach that can further the project of equal opportunities and diversity in the political and policy and policy-making arena’ (2010, p. 270). Building on the work of McCall (2005) and Bagilhole (2010), we attempt to apply the notion of intersectionality retrospectively (Weick, 1995) through a study of one organisation – Pan American Airways (Pan Am) – over time.

We undertake a retrospective study for three reasons: 1) as per Bagilhole (2010), to explore not only the strengths and limitations of the operationalisation of the concept of intersectionality but also the relative viability of McCall’s three methodological approaches; 2) to understand the influence of categories of difference on ‘regimes of inequality’ (Acker, 2006), thus revealing the ways in which (single) categories of difference serve to compound discrimination; and 3) to examine (and theorise) the role of history and the past (Booth and Rowlinson, 2006) in the development and understanding of categories of difference that, we argue, need to be understood in context.

We undertake our study with a framework that involves three elements: a theoretical categorisation of intersectionality by McCall (2005); a (postpositivist) case study (Mills et al., 2010) of Pan American Airways; and a framing of the past through the heuristic of ‘junctures’ (Mills, 2010).

Intersectionality and Theoretical Categories

McCall identifies three ‘approaches’ to the study of intersectionality according to ‘their stance towards categories’ (2005, p. 1773). The first, anticategorial complexity (p. 1773), draws from poststructuralist tradition in an approach that ‘deconstructs analytical categories’. This approach argues that ‘social life is too irreducibly complex … to make fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences’ (p. 1773). McCall views this approach as ‘the most successful in satisfying the demand for complexity’ (p. 1773). However, she goes on to suggest that it falters as a method as it comes up against the issues of categorisation as lived experience and the possibility of identity and voice in a research process that locates subjectivity in multiple identities/voices.

McCall’s second – intracategorical complexity – approach ‘acknowledges the stable and even durable relationships that social categories represent at any given point in time, though it also maintains a critical stance towards categories’ (2005, p. 1774). In overly simplified terms, this approach, while questioning the socially constructed character of categories as fixed, draws on broadly established notions of gender, race, class, etc. to ‘identify a previously invisible group and reveal the complex nature of its members’ daily lived experiences’ (Bagilhole, 2010, p. 268). Thus, for this approach, the ‘primary subject of analysis [is] typically either a single social group at a neglected point of intersection of multiple master categories or a particular social setting or ideological construction, or both’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1780).

McCall’s third – intersectional complexity – approach (also referred to as the ‘categorical approach’) differs from the previous (intrasectional) approach in that it uses existing categories strategically. It ‘begins with the observation that there are relationships of inequality among already constituted social groups, as imperfect and as ever changing as they are, and takes these relationships as the center of analysis’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1785). McCall (2005, p. 1773) sees a tendency for this latter approach to be conflated in the anticategorical approach, while Bagilhole (2010, p. 268), arguing that postmodern theory constitutes ‘a retreat from and a failure to engage with political realities’, contends ‘that the other two approaches to intersectionality offer a useful way back into the political and policy-making arena’. In our case study of Pan Am, we will explore each of McCall’s three approaches.

Pan Am: A Postpositive Case Study

McCall’s (2005) discussion of appropriate methods to study the complexity of intersectionality suggests – both inadvertently and overtly – the use of case study. In the latter case she mirrors the argument for case study research (Yin, 2009) in the statement that ‘intersectionality has introduced new methodological problems [due to] … the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expand [sic] to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories of analysis’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1772). She continues: ‘Not surprisingly, researchers favour methodologies that more naturally lend themselves to the study of complexity and reject methodologies that are considered too simplistic or reductionist’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1772). Later, in the same regard, she argues that: ‘Case studies and qualitative research more generally have always been distinguished by their ability to delve into the complexities of social life – to reveal diversity, variation, and heterogeneity where quantitative researchers see singularity, sameness, and homogeneity’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1782). Thus: ‘Many feminists who are trained in social science methods and who are interested in intersectionality use the case study method to identity a new or invisible group’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1782). In fairness, McCall also counsels that a shift toward studies of complex phenomena of this type ‘restricts the scope of knowledge that can be produced on intersectionality’ (2005, p. 1772).

With the last caveat in mind, we also embark on a case study to attempt to reveal the complex nature of intersectionality and the attempts to study it. Our approach is ‘postpositivist’ in that it eschews ontological notions of reality and truth and the adoption of pseudo-natural scientific approaches (Prasad, 2005). In developing an account of intersectionality in a single organisation over time (in our case Pan Am), we recognise the role of the researcher in imposing socially constructed boundaries, frameworks and events on the account that is developed (Mills et al., 2010). Following McCall, we assume ‘that different methodologies produce different kinds of knowledge’ (2005, p. 1772).

Methods of Study

The study we embarked upon centred on archival research, focused on a large collection of corporate documents (in 1,500 boxes) that constitute the Pan American Airways Collection 341, Series I and II held at the Otto Richter Library of the University of Miami. A team of four researchers visited the Collection on 14 different occasions, ranging from one to two weeks in the period from 2005 to 2010. The research has to date generated two PhD theses, numerous conference papers, journal articles and book chapters, and formed part of a book that focused on the gendering of airline cultures across three airlines. Although some of the research was focused on issues of organisational history, the bulk of the research centred on issues of gender and, to a lesser degree, race and ethnicity. While gender, race, ethnicity and history are all key elements of our discussion of intersectionality, the way in which the materials were originally collected may be a limitation to our findings.

Informed by a feminist poststructuralist approach (Calás and Smircich, 1996), our analysis of the materials for the current intersectionality research project involved the method of critical hermeneutics (Prasad and Mir, 2002) and an historical framing called junctures (see below). Critical hermeneutics involves a process of reading various texts (e.g., minutes, travelogues, company narratives, annual reports, film, diaries, published histories, etc.) to understand the role of: i) the interpretive conditions in which understanding takes place; ii) the researcher in the process of interpretation – his or her situatedness in the process; iii) language and history as conditions and limitations of understanding; iv) the process of textual reading as a form of translation (of researcher to audience); and v) ambiguity as a key outcome of the process to inhibit single readings of a given text or set of texts (Bryman et al., 2011).

Critical hermeneutics thus involved us in reading a series of Pan Am materials to see what was being said (the words on or missing from the page), for example, accounts, discussions and absences of different categories of people; how it was being said (the use of rhetoric, narrative, emplotment, etc – White, 1985), for example, who and how certain people were being privileged and who and how others were being marginalised; the historical context in which things were being said in order to understand both the conditions that allowed certain things to be said and to make sense of how statements were understood at the time, for example, what the conditions were that allowed for use of the term ‘Negro’ and how the term was understood at a certain point of time; and the translation of what was being said (the role of the researcher), for example, understanding and being cautious about the way that the researcher’s interpretations construct a sense of what was being said.

The Juncture as a Heuristic for Understanding Intersectionality

Collins (2000, p. 299) argues that: ‘Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice’. There is a need for analysis to look at the whole person rather than breaking up a person into component parts. Individuals possess one identity that encompasses multiple and intersecting oppressions, but in order to prevent impotence on inequality, it is important to recognise that different oppressions surface as more important from time to time (Bagilhole, 2006).

We contend that the study of intersectionality needs to be understood as embedded in a changing historical context (or contexts). This is arguable at two levels. First, the concept of intersectionality is itself a concept that needs to be understood in the context of its development. McCall hints broadly at this when she says ‘that [i]nterest in intersectionality arose out of a critique of gender-based and race-based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected points of intersection’ (2005, p. 1780). Although an explanation of the development of the idea of intersectionality is beyond the scope of this chapter, we are cautioned to be careful in how we impose our understanding of intersectionality on organisational actors and events in times before the term was invented. People almost certainly felt the pull of varying and conflicting social categories in the past, but how that was understood was different from how we might currently choose to make sense of those experiences. Second, intersectionality is often viewed as a particular way of understanding social location in terms of crisscross systems of oppression. Collins, for example, describes intersectionality as an ‘analysis claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization’ (2000, p. 299). We would go further and argue that social location, systems of oppressions and the intersectional features of social organisation can be thought of as outcomes at points in time. To understand those locations, systems and features of oppression, we also need to understand them in context. To understand how they develop, are maintained and change over time, we need to understand how each is/was understood at different points of time. This is for at least two reasons. First, as McCall recognises, the ‘artificiality of social categories can be illuminated in history with the method of genealogy, in literature with deconstruction, and in anthropology with the new ethnography’ (2005, p. 1778). However, second, what is equally important is the character of artificiality and how its fictitiousness is developed and maintained.

Understanding intersectionality over time involves history per se. Our approach relies on anti-positivist analyses of history where history is viewed as accounts of the past that are invented rather than discovered (White, 1973; Munslow, 2010). To that end, we view the past not as a linear, progressive or evolutionary process, but rather as a series of (dominant) mentalities. To capture that process, we draw on the notion of the juncture (Mills, 2010) as a methodological devise for studying organisational change over time: ‘it refers to a concurrence of events in time in which a series of images, impressions, and experiences come together, giving the appearance of a coherent whole that influences how an organization is understood’ (Mills, 2010, p. 509). Although not directly related, the approach has something in common with Foucault’s (1979) notion of episteme and Febve and Bloch’s notion of mentalities (Bloch, 1953).

The concept of juncture is used as a heuristic, the idea of which is that we track a dominant mentality in a particular organisation around the issues of intersectionality. We then follow the mentality over time to assess where and when it appears in corporate imagery, but also where it appears to change. Having identified two differing points of intersectionality, which we label ‘junctures’, we then work backwards through the documentation to gain a sense of when one ends and the other begins. We then examine events around the apparent change to assess what factors are associated with the change. We then move forward through the material to see if there are signs of different forms of dominant mentalities, identifying new junctures in the process. We hope that the accumulated evidence provides clues to the development, maintenance and changing character of intersectionality over time, as well as its problematisation. The concept was originally developed to make sense of the gendering of airline companies over time (Helms Mills, 2005; Mills, 2006; Dye and Mills, 2012).

Intersectionality, Jun...