When I travel by plane to meetings with my colleagues in other countries, I hope it's a female captain, though it rarely happens. Because stereotypes dictate that captains should be men. This issue extends to many other professions, like firefighters, truckdrivers and also the other way around, for male nurses, who face similar biases and systemic barriers. I am convinced that if you make untraditional choices, you are likely to want it so much, that you will climb all the barriers and fight the biases of others no matter what comes your way. And that’s why I believe females are better airline captains.
My thought shows that gender equality is still lagging in 2025 - even though International Women's Day has been an annual event for more than 100 years and gender equality has gained more attention over the years.
The gender imbalance is evident already in the choice of education, with STEM studies not being popular among female students. Women often choose to pursue careers in medicine, communications, or law, while the technology, energy, and utilities industries continue to be opted out.
Mirror mirror on the wall
But why are industries like technology, energy and utilities, and defense and security being overlooked by women? The answer, in my view, is a challenge that unfortunately runs through society. For example, when I read the media, I am met with a mirror of myself. White men sharing their experiences and expertise, in their prime, wearing dark blue suits. I get confirmation that what I'm doing is right. However, if a woman opens the newspaper, she is not met with the same positive self-image. There is a lack of exposure to female experts and role models that aspiring female talents can look up to.
Female role models are not only needed in the media, but also in the workplace, where outdated gender roles are still embedded in work tasks. I used to work for a company where the ratio of women to men was respectively 26% and 74%. In one of the departments, they had appointed a group of employees to organize employee events and perks. A task that benefits everyone, but did not lead to promotion. To my surprise, the group consisted entirely of women. Apparently, it was seen as a woman's job to take care of all her colleagues. This is not acceptable if we want to highlight female role models to attract more female talent.
The reason men and women unfortunately end up in these stereotypical gender roles is an unconscious bias that everyone has - including me. It starts in early childhood, where boys are encouraged to take interest in STEM classes. In contrast, girls are expected to take on caring roles - even though she dreams of being an airline captain. It's an early social divide that leads to more barriers and biases and follows us through life. If the girl follows her dream and becomes a captain, she will still face questions like: Who is looking for your children, while you are flying? I know that her male counterpart doesn’t get this question.
Change starts in your own backyard
As mentioned earlier, challenges with gender equality also exists in the technology industry. And at twoday we have not been good enough to ensure better diversity either.
My years of experience as a leader show that change in society unfortunately does not happen by itself. Instead, we have to take matters into our own hands – and it’s starting with ourselves at twoday. But good things take time. That's why, over the past year, we have worked to create several processes and initiatives that commit twoday to working actively to create a more inclusive and diverse workplace.
One of our action points for 2025 will be to complete mandatory training for all leaders to help them understand their unconscious bias towards other people and learn how to act on them. Another action point is to begin succession planning for key positions and critical role within the company, where we identify a successor of each binary gender. We will also strengthen our focus on inclusive communication and create new recruitment processes that allow for better gender balance. This includes avoiding gender-coded words in job advertising, which can subconsciously attract more men or women respectively, using a structured interview format where all candidates are asked the same set of questions, which helps reduce bias and ensure fairness, and utilizing a variety of channels to post our job openings, targeting diverse communities.
These initiatives are the first of many towards creating more diversity and inclusion that will ultimately benefit our customers, colleagues, and society.
The captain has now welcomed me onto the flight to Oslo. It wasn't a woman today either, but I look forward to the day when I don't wonder whether it's a male or female pilot flying me safely to my destination.