Of Female Airline Captains and Historical Lawsuits

The first female pilot who was hired by a commercial airline was the American Helen Richey, back in 1934. Today, according to estimates, there are approximately 4,000 women around the world who are employed as airline pilots. However, the first woman captain in El Al, Israel’s National Airline, was only recently accepted to the company – and only after a lawsuit filed by the Association for Civil rights in Israel (ACRI) on behalf of another female pilot over a decade ago.
 
Before we recount the historical lawsuit: Congratulations to Smadar Schechter, El Al’s first female captain, who was accepted to this position a few months ago. In an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on 4 May 2011, Schechter says that she has dreamt of being a pilot ever since she was a young girl, and that as a teenager she wanted to join the Israeli Air Force Flight Course – but at the time, women were not allowed in the course. Schechter adds that she is not treated differently as a captain because she is a woman: “I’m judged based only on what I do and know how to do best. Everyone flatters me and loves me.”
 
But, as is too often the case, it takes a persistent struggle for a woman to be accepted to a role she desires and for her to be judged according to her skills and not according to her gender. The lawsuit against El Al was filed in 1998 to the Labor Court on behalf of Orit Katzir, a captain who has gained lots of flight experience as a pilot in commercial airlines in the United States. The lawsuit was filed for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) by Attorney Hadas Tagri (now a law lecturer and a PhD student at the Bar Ilan University Law School) and by Attorney Leah Glicksman (now a judge at the Tel Aviv Labor Court).
 
In response to the lawsuit, El Al claimed that the company does not discriminate against women because of their gender, but that it only hires pilots who have completed the Israel Air Force Flight Course. This was shortly after the High Court petition filed by ACRI and by the Israel Women’s Network on behalf of Alice Miller, which opened the IAF flight course to women, and obviously there were still no women within the IAF in those days. After a lengthy debate, El Al caved in and canceled this discriminatory criterion. Orit Katzir eventually decided not to continue the process, and it took many more years until the first pilot was accepted to El Al.
 
Attorney Hadas Tagri, who filed ACRI’s lawsuit on behalf of Orit Katzir in 1998, said following the story of El Al Captain Smadar Schechter that “the acceptance of the first female captain to El Al is a very happy occasion, but the fact that there is only one, single and first, female captain points in fact to blatant inequality. We can only hope that Israel’s National Airline will act vehemently to realize the principle of equality de facto, and to remove any obstacles preventing more female pilots from joining the company’s ranks.”