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0 pointsfennecfoxen4y ago0 comments

When was the last time you flew a plane and noticed the pilot? Was he a somewhat older white guy? That's fine. Do we have an unlimited supply of older white guy pilots? Unlikely.

If you wish to improve way you hire in an industry like the airlines, where candidates make multi-year and even multi-decade commitments to one of a very few companies, this requires you to invest in a recruitment pipeline, and do outreach. This is part of it.

Career search is terrifyingly inefficient. People don't just land in jobs randomly, but they often don't realize the best career path and pick that one. Rather, labor market has a variety of structural inefficiencies and a strong component of path dependency. If your friends are all going into programming, you might think about it more seriously and decide to go into programming. If you were a white kid and none of your friends are into programming and every time you saw a programmer it was some, say, some very talented young woman of Indian descent in a sari, making references to Diwali that you didn't understand, well, you might not think programming is the career path for you. But if someone puts a bunch of ads in your neighborhood and bus stop and the newspaper and the local community college for a career in programming, emphasizing that you're welcome there too, that might change, and you might find some people you can relate to there, easing your onboarding into the community in general until you understand and can make all the jokes about Kennedy Steve squawking 7500 at the ramp.

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ALittleLight4y ago

As you observe airline pilots, especially for the big passenger planes, tend to be older. This is because you need to work your way up to flying those planes. If the pilots are 50-60 years old, then, when they were born, (1960's - 1970's) the USA was ~90% white. That compares to now when it's about 60% white. So, it makes sense that older people in the US, airline pilots included, are disproportionately white compared to current population.

Airlines also tend to hire out of the airforce - letting the government do the work of training pilots. The airforce is (and was) disproportionately white and male compared to the general population. It seems perfectly reasonable for airlines to hire trained pilots out of the airforce.

I'm not really sure what you're saying with this comment. As I read it - it seems like you're suggesting that, wittingly or unwittingly, airlines are racist and their racism is so severe that it overrides their financial incentives to source pilots from as wide a pool as possible. And, your reason for believing this, is that you notice airline pilots are often old white men.

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ALittleLight4y ago

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