Flying a plane is the perfect job for women

When I was a girl and asking myself the eternal question, "What will I be when I grow up?", there were two careers that never entered my mind – becoming a pilot and becoming a film director. That's because there were few, if any, role models for young women in these professions.

Fast-forward a lot of decades and you could say things have improved. Not much, but there has been a little progress. In the case of women film and TV directors there are a few successful ones such as locals Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and Cate Shortland, but I was watching a documentary last week that pointed to the fact that only a tiny percentage of all motion picture and TV directors in Hollywood are women (less than 5 per cent).

For female pilots, the statistics are much the same. About 5 per cent of commercial pilots worldwide are female, amounting to about 200 women. The difference between then and now is it is possible for me to be seated in a plane ready for take-off and hear a woman's voice do the announcement from the flight deck. So zero to 5 per cent in about 20 years isn't that great, but it's something. And a young girl hearing that might consider the profession a possibility, when it wasn't even an idea in my head.

Tiffany Tracy, a 10-year veteran with British Airways flying 777s internationally (including to Australia), studied law before she read an article in Cosmopolitan magazine about female pilots and decided to begin a training course. As a small child she'd watched the first Concord flight and had been enthralled, but like me, hadn't considered flying as a career for herself.

Training was expensive, but she was initially sponsored by Aer Lingus, interned at a flying school for her basic commercial licence, and then went straight from light aircraft to 777 when joining BA. It wasn't an affirmative action program: most pilots, male or female, need to be sponsored by an airline as costs are so high. Tiffany is now a first officer among 400 pilots in her fleet.

I met Tiffany at British Airways headquarters in London, along with Hannah Webb, a pilot on short-haul BA flights within the UK and Europe. Both women are terrific ambassadors for the airline and active in raising awareness of the profession for young women.

While Tiffany says she loves being paid to go to far-flung destinations and thrives on the adrenalin rush of it all, Hannah is the parent of a small child and pregnant with another. (She's currently not permitted to fly an aircraft.) She says that captaining an aircraft is "a really good profession to have with a family. You spend a lot of time at home."

I find this totally unexpected, as I imagined it would be quite disruptive. Not so, Hannah says. She flies short haul, which means she has the option to take only two flights a day, and all are under 5½ hours duration. "I get to see my daughter every day.''

Tiffany says: "Even with long haul we have blocks of time off." Not that it's always a breeze. Going to sleep is a skill, especially when you might do 16 time zone changes in a month. It's illegal for pilots to take sleeping aids like melatonin. And the 777 is hell on your skin.