Defying Gravity – Women Will Continue to Soar Despite the ‘Radical’ Dismantling and Demolition of DEI Programs
If you’re following me, I’m guessing you’re not just here for the entertainment and adventure of our stories. I imagine, no matter your gender or race, you want to connect with our collective history. You want to feel a sense of belonging with a group of likeminded people who share your interest and passion. You want to be inspired by the incredible resilience, tenacity, and courage of our women in aviation. You crave role models who overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and emerged victorious, to know that you, too, can achieve your own dreams, even when they seem impossible.
Just as gravity is an indisputable obstacle to soaring the skies, society’s attitudes about gender have universally been an obstacle to women’s aspirations in aviation since the first flight. As our stories form a comprehensive narrative of our history in my mind, I see the places where, like soaring in a glider, we’ve found lift and climbed toward and beyond the stratosphere, where we’ve periodically lost it and descended gradually to the next updraft, and the places where we’ve experienced occasional downbursts, resulting in significant losses of altitude on our path.
No pilot, regardless of gender or race, wants to believe their license, certification, qualification, or employment was awarded by systemic or personal favoritism. This is true of many avocations to be sure, but we’re a particularly proud bunch. To quote a beloved pilot-mentor of mine, “We’re not cocky. We’re appropriately arrogant.”
Why? Because we know what it takes, especially in this modern era of aviation, to earn those certifications. The standards are clear, and if we earned the little card with the picture of Wilbur and Orville in our pocket, we met those standards. We understand the stakes of not meeting those standards, even after we’ve earned the license. Gravity is indisputable.
Those periodic losses of lift, and those occasional downbursts happen to all of us pilots here and there, for a variety of reasons—we make a critical error, experience a mishap, our life responsibilities overwhelm us, we have temporary health setbacks, 9-11 happens, Covid.
In addition to those universal obstacles, women experience the added pressures of gender norms that prescribe our roles in society, the preconceived diminished performance expectations in roles outside those norms, and the hostile defensiveness of a culture that aligns certain roles with masculinity, to which we are seen as a threat. In our society of 70 years ago, which regaled men as breadwinners, we were snatching crumbs from the mouths of babes if we soared.
Society has changed in the past 70 years, and women have earned our place in aviation, in combat, on the hangar deck, in space. Despite our proven performance over decades and generations, we still meet obstacles of gender bias and assumptions. These biases and assumptions leave a gap in maximizing the talent available to aviation organizations. And these biases and assumptions are what DEI programs were intended to eliminate or minimize.
I personally experienced the limitations of gender bias (if not outright misogyny) at several junctures in my own career, but none more clearly illustrative than being eliminated from a candidate pool, despite being the best qualified, based solely on my gender.
As an Officer Candidate for the U.S. Coast Guard, I competed for the opportunity to attend Navy Flight training against the 30 or so candidates in my class. I was a prior enlisted ship navigator, which meant I had a significant advantage over civilians who were just being indoctrinated into the Coast Guard, but I had plenty of prior-enlisted competition as well. I finished second in my class with the #1 recommendation for flight school from the school commander.
When assignments were announced, four candidates who ranked below me in my class were selected for flight training. I was sent to what was a Group/Air Station at the time, to serve at a desk managing our smaller cutters and small boat stations for a year at a unit where I was one of two officers who weren’t pilots.
I was sitting at my desk one day, watching the helicopters land outside my window, when that beloved mentor I mentioned earlier walked in and saw the longing in my eyes. When he discovered that all I had wanted was to go to flight school, I was swept up the stairs and into the Commanding Officer’s office, my application was submitted once again, and a couple of months later I received the good news that I’d been selected for flight school. I only had to serve a full year in my position before transferring.
Most people in this situation would never know what happened or why. The Coast Guard is a small organization, though, and the assignment officer who was involved in the decision reported to my unit a couple of months before my departure to Navy Pensacola. I requested a meeting and asked why I hadn’t been selected out of OCS.
He was unapologetic in his explanation. I had been eliminated from the candidate pool because, on paper, I was a divorced woman with a dependent child. A couple of women had washed out of flight school the year before, and he considered me high risk. No one called to ask what my support network was, or even if I had primary custody. I did, and I was in a stable relationship, I just wasn’t remarried. Apparently, it didn’t register that I had also just completed a 16-week training program (away from my child) after being stationed at a unit that was at sea for 6-8 weeks at a time, so a land billet, where all I had to do was focus on training, and would be home every night, was going to be a cake-walk in comparison.
Three of the four candidates who were selected in my stead either dropped on request or washed out of training.
I later went on to be an assignment officer myself, at a time when the organization was investing heavily in ‘affinity groups’ and promoting diversity, before we had the moniker “DEI”. This did not mean that women and minorities were receiving opportunities for which they were not competitive. It meant that every candidate pool for a high performing opportunity required the consideration of as diverse a group of candidates as available among the top performers who met the criteria, ‘diversity’ meaning both ethnicity/race/gender and operational/geographic/platform specialty. It also meant that any assignments or selections I, or a selection board, made, needed to demonstrate our thought process amidst a wide variety of considerations.
Had these measures been in place when I was in the candidate pool for flight school, I believe more critical questions would have been asked in the briefing process. I have no doubt that a male candidate in my position—divorced with a dependent—would have gone under the assumption that his ex would handle things, would have received a phone call to ask about his support network, or that the assumption would have been that he would handle his childcare needs independent of external scrutiny.
With a greater focus on DEI, the Coast Guard might have saved on the Permanent Change of Station (household goods move, travel, etc,) and inter-service training costs of selecting lesser-qualified and -motivated individuals and would have capitalized on far more specialized service from me than sitting at a desk watching helicopters land outside my window for a year on an O1-E salary ($5K/month today.) Instead, my opportunity was limited by the sexist assumptions of a person from the majority in a position of power acting with impunity in a way that did not equip the Service or the country to maximum effect.
This was 1996. Almost three decades ago. And this is what gives me hope.
I soared despite this egregiously gender-biased (sexist) thinking. And in doing so, I informed a new generation of supervisors, peers, and subordinates. I continued to face obstacles in my path, most never revealed in their full glory as this one. DEI programs didn’t eliminate discrimination, sexism, and bias, nor did they create them—they discouraged and controlled discrimination based on gender, race, and other factors not related to performance, and helped to illuminate biases that limit organizational excellence.
To be clear, my use of the word ‘radical’ in my title isn’t intended to mock DEI programs—it is intended to mock the title of the command to remove them. DEI isn’t ‘radical’. It is a framework to ensure the highest qualified people are selected despite the biases and bigotry leaders bring with them into the workforce. Without it, or a framework like it, I’m concerned the misogynists and racists will gradually go back to their old ways, seeing this move as permission to act with impunity rather than hide their beliefs in the shadows.
What gives me hope in this moment where the intent is to twist the true narrative of our history, to manipulate the language used for decades to argue for equal rights and opportunity, to convince the majority that they are the ones who have been downtrodden and oppressed, is that we are smarter than this now. Working with me and my peers, along with the DEI programs that have brought oversight and awareness to those who otherwise considered themselves neutral participants in the workforce, created and army of allies who know and understand our additional pressures, and who see clearly how those pressures limit organizational success.
We are not the docile, uneducated, impressionable subjects of a Jim Crow society whose leaders aimed to divide us to control us. My peers, who witnessed my performance and my struggle, are leaders themselves now. They don’t need a DEI program to continue to promote the best qualified based on their proven performance, despite gender or race. The removal of these programs in this particular way is a tactic meant to scare and divide us. I trust those leaders who sat beside me in the helicopter to carry on, leading the organization fairly in defiance of the underlying intent in the policy changes.
Much has been lost, to be certain. I personally mourn the loss of organizational and financial support to networking events that I had a hand in creating. I took great pride in attending the Women in Aviation International conference each year and seeing over a hundred Coast Guard women and men representing our service and talking about issues that needed to be addressed to ensure the development and retention of highly qualified and trained talent. Those women know what that looks like now, and they’re going to want it back. I trust they will find a way to make it happen, with or without the financial support of the organization.
Regardless of the background noise in government, the media, or in the popular debate, our professional men and women understand that gender isn’t a discriminator – potential, motivation, dedication, performance, and skill are the discriminators that maximize the competitiveness of an organization.
Women in aviation will continue to defy gravity.
