Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Monday the 17th of November. I think this is the first time I've talked to somebody

who is licensed to fly both helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. She is Catherine Maloney. She is

the founder of Elevate Her, which is...

It's a global organisation dedicated to raising a percentage of women in aviation worldwide.

I'm going to speak from the passengers' perspective.

So I'm seeing a lot of women working in aviation, at airports,

a lot of them working as cabin crew, and I am staggered that, as far as I know,

only 6% of pilots in the UK are women. Actually, 6% is the global statistic. So in the UK, it's

actually 4.7%. But interestingly, aviation as a whole is actually 30% female, but less than 5%

in key roles such as engineering, pilot roles and air traffic control. If we can start off with

pilots, I can think of a number of reasons why being a pilot, particularly for a woman who has

children, would not be automatically their first choice,

particularly if you're talking about flying long haul and so on.

It's interesting you say that, because when we look at the percentage, like you just said, of female cabin crew,

they have the same challenges with both rostering and the time scale.

They're on the same flights as the pilots.

They're just not doing a pilot role. So it is actually really interesting where we see this

split. And a lot of it, I think, comes from perceptions around aviation careers and also role

modelling at a real ground level with young girls and showing them that pilots can be women.

Same of engineers and air traffic controllers too. But I've been looking at some of the statistics you've produced and for

example, women report that one in six of them say, actually, I'm learning to fly or whatever,

...