Why men don’t want to be flight attendants
Amanda Hyde
It was something of a coup last month when an all-male cabin crew worked on a China Airlines flight from Taipei to New York. This did not happen by chance and was not planned by the airline. In fact, a group of the carrier’s more senior male flight attendants created the scenario themselves by bidding to have the service added to its route, with female cabin crew agreeing to step aside.
This demonstration was to commemorate the change in policy of Taiwanese China Airlines, which had previously limited the number of male cabin crew that could work on a single flight. In fact, industry insiders believe this practice continues with other carriers.
This is not always the case. Far from it. In the early days of aviation, flight attendants or “cabin attendants” were all men. The first one was the waiter. Heinrich KubisHe had previously worked at the Ritz Paris and in 1912 boarded a German Zeppelin to serve drinks to passengers.
“Since early flights can be a harrowing experience, it was thought that men could do a better job of keeping passengers calm,” explains Cary O’Dell, who wrote the book. Pink Collar Men It’s about men working in fields traditionally dominated by women.
It would be another 18 years before a woman could take office. In 1930, Ellen Church became the first “air hostess”, aided by her nurse qualifications. She actually had dreams of becoming a pilot, but was rejected because she was a woman (it would be another 39 years before Turi Widerøe was hired by SAS and became the first woman to work as a commercial pilot for a major Western airline).
A few years after Church was hired, in 1934, Nelly Deiner secured a position with Swiss Air to become Europe’s first female flight attendant (she died tragically during a flight that same year). However, it was not until the Second World War, when men set out to fight in large groups, that women began to settle in huts, leading to a gender imbalance that is still effective today.
The rise of the ‘tram car’
This is not a “turned into a worm” story. The social climate of the 1950s and 1960s created a particularly sexist stereotype of cabin crew. This was the period when stewardesses were trained on “charm farms” and the term “trolley car” was coined. Meanwhile, the job description required women to be young and unmarried; sometimes they held this position for only a few years.
While women dominated the cabin, men had the opportunity to relax while returning from important business trips. A 1966 United Airlines ad read: “You slept in after dinner. Why not? You work hard. When the flight landed, the stewardess said goodbye as if she really meant it. That’s what she does. She even corrected you.” boutonniere. “You’ll see this kind of ‘extra care’ every time you fly with us.”
At the same time, the moral panic triggered by the highly publicized murder of homosexual Eastern Airlines steward William T. Simpson in 1954 gave American airlines an excuse to stop employing men. By the 1960s, many operators refused to have men working in the cab. The situation would later be exacerbated by the AIDS crisis.
O’Dell explains: “During this time, US-based airlines did a lot to keep men (all men, as all male flight attendants were considered suspicious) out of the cabin, either because they were HIV-positive or because they were afraid their customers would be HIV-positive. Additionally, airlines did not want to take on the medical/insurance costs of HIV-positive men, so it was easier not to hire any men.”
Accordingly Research in a 2007 article By: Phil Tiemeyer of the University of Colorado Boulder An airline executive who testified in 1967 was comfortable enough to tell the court about gender roles in the industry: “Anyone who has ever been on a plane and seen an airplane knows it’s a girl’s job… the job of a pretty young girl.”
With attitudes like these, it’s no surprise that the tasks cabin crew perform, from caring for sick passengers to enforcing emergency protocols, become trivialized and men who want the job become stereotyped as effeminate.
This stereotyping had a lasting impact. “Growing up in the 1990s, when you said you wanted to be a flight attendant it was often met with stigma, as if only gay men were doing the job because it was seen as a woman’s role,” says Jay Robert, a senior cabin crew member for a European airline and creator of the Facebook group. A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew LoungeA site with 1.5 million followers. “Even today, many airlines still perpetuate these golden age stereotypes in their marketing, and it doesn’t work. Many men are still hesitant to apply due to the ongoing female role stigma.”
O’Dell agrees. “The excessive expectation that all male flight attendants are gay is something that keeps straight men out of the profession,” he says. “For many straight men, this would be a great job – it involves traveling and, frankly, meeting lots of single women – but the potential blowback from friends and society regarding their masculinity is more than many straight men are willing to take on.”
A 2024 report by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) highlighted that women made up just 5.1 per cent of licensed personnel in aviation (pilots, air traffic controllers and maintenance technicians) in 2021, but cited figures produced by the US Census Bureau suggesting 74.9 per cent of flight attendants were women. In Australia, that figure rises to 77 percent, according to federal government data.
‘Passengers prefer beautiful legs to beards’
During America’s civil rights movement, men seeking careers at 35,000 feet began trying to overturn airlines’ unfair hiring policies in the courts.
Among them is Celio Diaz Jr. There was also. Aspiring to be a “male stewardess”, she first lost a gender discrimination lawsuit against Pan Am in 1970; The airline argued that women were better at “reassuring anxious passengers, providing courteous personalized service, and generally making flights as pleasant as possible within the limitations imposed by aircraft operations.” (A journalist covering the case New York Times He claimed that “statistics show that an overwhelming majority of passengers prefer beautiful legs to beards.”) Diaz Jnr won on appeal.
Slowly men began to return to the sky. “I started my career as a flight attendant in 1974, at a time when it was very unusual to see men working the cabin on US aircraft carriers,” reads a comment in Jay Robert’s Facebook group. “We were harassed, mocked, ignored and sometimes even withdrawn from assigned flights by pilots who refused to let us on board.
“Our female colleagues were our protectors, mother bears who fiercely protected their cubs. I continued to fly for nearly 40 years, and I am forever grateful for their friendship and love.”
Meanwhile in 1978 New York Times The article confirmed, men changed their minds about how difficult the job was when they saw other men doing it. One frequent flyer told the newspaper: “It wasn’t until I met my first steward that I began to take seriously the fact that these people were there for public safety, not just for booze and decorations. And I still hesitate to ask a steward for anything when there’s a stewardess around.”
you have a man
Some airlines have been slow to keep up with the times. “China Airlines’ last all-male crew attracted so much attention because it wasn’t an airline marketing tactic, and because it happened in Asia, a part of the aviation industry that the Western world began to abandon in the late 1970s to the 1990s, where many sexist and outdated rules for cabin crew still apply,” says Robert. “Until this decade, it was very rare to see male flight attendants in Asia, and if they were on the plane, they were usually kept in the galley and outside the cabin.”
Remarkably, a handful of operators still employ exclusively female flight attendants. Jet Airways explained this choice during its attempted (and ultimately unsuccessful) relaunch in 2022 as a cost-cutting measure to allow employees to share rooms. India’s low-cost airline IndiGo is reducing the weight of its all-female crew (and therefore saving fuel) and is continuing its broader efforts to hire more women (it also has nearly twice the number of female pilots than the industry average).
Robert sees things differently. “To me, it is deeply disappointing that in 2025 there are still giant airlines who have the courage to declare that they fly above the patriarchy thanks to their female pilots, while on the other side of the door they only allow women to fly as cabin crew, thus returning to traditional patriarchal roles for women.”
However, many operators are now committed to more balanced gender roles, and a cabin crew coaching firm claims that more men are entering the profession. IATA’s 2024 report states: “Some airlines have included a commitment to employ more men in the cabin, ‘with a commitment of at least 45 per cent of both genders’.” It can signal positive changes ahead.
“I’m now seeing a lot of young straight men taking on this role, whereas in the past it was much more rare,” says Robert. “Also, young passengers don’t care whether the person watching over their lives in the sky is a man or a woman, as long as they are competent and professional – which is as it should be.”
Requirements to become a flight attendant in 1954
Earlier this year, a Reddit user went viral after posting “Stewardess qualifications” at Chicago and Southern Air Lines In 1954:
- Single – not engaged
- Between 22 and 28 years old
- Between 5 feet 2 inches (157.5 cm) and 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm)
- Between 100 and 120 pounds (45 and 54 kg)
- Good vision (no glasses)
- good teeth
- good figure
- thin legs
- Natural color for hair
- At least four years of college or two years of college and two years of work experience
- Ability to maintain a live chat
- good handling
- Be angry – passengers’ demands should not be provoked
- Eager and anxious to please
- willing to transfer
- United States citizen
- excellent health
- clean skin
- beautiful hands
Telegraph, London
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