University of Waterloo researchers released a report that found female pilots with fewer than 300 hours of flight time conducted more stable landings and completed emergency-scenario tasks faster than their male counterparts did. The study, presented at the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, included a group of 20 low-time pilots composed of 10 women and 10 men. This group conducted nine landing trials using a high-fidelity simulator while wearing eye-tracking glasses.
Gaze metrics like fixation durations and saccade rates did not show significant differences between genders, but female participants demonstrated greater consistency on normal approaches and finished the simulated engine-failure drill in less time than men. Participants in the study also assigned themselves self-reported Situation Awareness (SA) scores after each trial. Female pilots assigned themselves higher SA scores across the board.
The authors say their findings from this study may call into question some oft-held beliefs about how men and women handle stress in aviation. Initial results could stand to benefit flight schools and airlines as they look to strengthen the equity and safety of their recruiting and training practices. Future iterations of the research, the authors say, will likely incorporate additional emergency scenarios and a larger pool of participants.
Interesting tech…but with only 10 men and 10 women, seems hard to conclude much
The study is irrelevant, it is just intended to divide.
Maybe this was proven at YYZ after the pilot flying, female, was helpful in evacuation efforts subsequent to her “lawn darting” the CRJ into the concrete.
No, the study is not irrelevant, it is one study with credible, documented results of gender differences in the performance in one very specific set of tasks There needs to be many more of them, with larger sample sizes, to establish any correlation upon which to base pilot selection.
It is well-established that there are sex differences in the way our brains process information, not necessarily better or worse, just differently. For a specific set of complex tasks, there may well be optimal factors that are gender-related.
But such studies would certainly require a larger sample size than the one that Hotdog proffered. Like a male pilot never pooched a landing …
Ok… once you find out the differences, then what? Do you start segregating pilots based upon type of aircraft flown, 121, 135, airspace? Once you have good conclusions, then what?
Controlled metric simulated exercises have very little application to real world operations. After nearly 40 years as an International B-777 Captain, Check Airman and APD I have witnessed a few examples to refute this study. Also, after retirement I join the FAA as an Air Carrier Operations Inspector 1825 performing the duties and responsibilities of of an Aircrew Program Manager conducting Advanced Qualification Program validations/approvals, airmen certification events and regulatory oversight of 14 CFR Part 121 operations.
Knowledge is Power so yes, this study is valid as it contributes to more understanding of the relation to stress and eye scan. I also agree that a 10 person study is a very small group to base broad conclusions or as findings for policy and training.
I talked to a retired pilot about an observation I had regarding the glass cockpit. I come from a tech viewpoint so one might think that I would love the glass cockpit…but I do not. As I watch youtube videos from channels like Mentour Pilot, in current accidents, at times it seems pilots are completely missing/not reading what is on the screen as data scrolls by…I come from a world of analog dials and what I love(d) about them wasat an instance, you got visual information without the brain having to interpret what it is seeing.
VSI level, I’m level. Pegged down going down real fast
ASI points to a spot I know is cruise, I confirm and my scan is not then checking a digital number, but did it change.
Same with a compass.
Looking at a glass panel with just strips left and right, in high stress, I can see where there is a disconnect between what the eyes sees as raw data and how long it takes the brain to convert.
Even something as basic as color vs letters for colors are not interpreted, they connect to basic survival instincts like okay (green) bad (red) vs having use higher levels of the brain to determine that message is bad.
So, moving on from this study I’d alter it and test if there are eye scan stress differences between a glass cockpit and and more analog style. Then, do females process one vs the other different then males and if so, maybe in the future panels can be somewhat configured to provide the best information when pilots are in high stress.
Personally, I’d love a glass panel where I still have a attitude indicator with FMS capabilities, but my main positional indicators were dials (sure, digital) that fed basic information by being out of position then valued (as in 500, 1000 up or down).
Sorry, but samples are way too small. Not even a data point. You’d need much bigger numbers and it would be very challenging to filter out all of the confounding factors, which would be expensive. Then, once you do all that, you might find that the gender difference is actually tiny to undetectable, which, of course, would just lead to a lot of fodder for endless debate. This could never be settled by actual science.
You get what you pay for…
The fact that you like analog doesn’t make analog better, it just makes you old. I grew up on analog myself but most of my career ended up being on glass. It isn’t better or worse, just different. There’s bugs to set for indexing all the things you used to use clock positions for on the round gage. The problem isn’t tied to glass. The problem is the people. I fly with pilots every day who don’t actually understand what goes on behind the panel. The procedures and techniques and checklists might as well be magic spells they cast rather than the logical conclusion of the way the aircraft is. I fly with pilots every day who are more worried about the appearance of compliance with a rule than in understanding why the rule exists.
As for the study, I’d love to know more about their selection methodology, particularly with a sample size of 10. I work in a fleet of about 1000 pilots and I can easily cherry pick any 10 you want.
And the study is largely irrelevant when the airlines, the military, and everyone have pulled out all the stops over the last decade to pump up their numbers of female hires and barely moved the needles. Turns out in a free society it’s hard to make people do a job they simply aren’t interested in.
True horsepucky. An article in “Flying” decades ago examined the performance of pilots before and after having a few beers. I think the late Dick Collins and J. Mack McLennin or perhaps it was some one else ( Peter Garrison?) examined the performance of a pilot executing a minimums approach and tabulated the results. Guess what? The best results were obtained after the pilot had a beer and a half or so. The control parameters define the results. When you are sitting in a tin box on hydraulic stilts you know that you will emerge after the session and can go home to your abode with a few dollars in your wallet. How well or poorly you did has no bearing on your livlehood if you aren’t employed by an airline. Young people have better eyesight and reflexes than older folks but do not have the background or understanding of how and when to react in the best way to unforseen circumstances. When you’re belted in an aircraft with a whole lot of people behind you counting on YOU to make ALL the right decisions the pucker factor goes way up and your performance needs to as well, just so you can make that late payment on your condo/truck/alimoney without extra charges.
Would you care to be a bit more specific?
And if I was specific there would be respondents unhappy with those examples made public. Suffice to say, having conducted many events will ultimately reveal enough evidence to support my experiences.
Age is an enormous factor. There is a great book titled “Why Gender Matters” by a gentleman who is both an MD and a PhD (psychology). If these low time pilots where in their young twenties, then I am fairly certain the results would be the same with a larger sample.
Also - the confidence level. There is a calmness that prevails and allows better functioning when one is confident. (No one thinks as well under emotional duress.)
The greatest variable is, as mentioned by a few, the fact that this is a simulator. There is no risk, no one will die if you screw up, etc. Men’s shallow mindedness (I’m a guy, I know!) also helps them to focus, to cut back emotions, when under stress.
Since my approach is from the counseling side I asked a neurosurgeon if there was really much difference between the genders as to the brain. Go ahead and do the same yourself - you’ll be amazed. He poured a lot of data on me but I’ll pass this one on - “If I operate on a man’s brain, thinking it’s a woman, I’ll kill him.” And the reverse is true. We are simply dramatically different in gender - more than any other difference in humankind.
This study is OBVIOUSLY irrelevant. Not only is a sample size of 10 meaningless, but the metrics are bad from an operational safety standpoint. Faster approaches? That’s BAD. That means poor airspeed control. Faster emergency procedure? That’s BAD, that means less time for teamwork and shared mental model, more likelyhood of making a critical and irrecoverable error. We do NOT rush in the sim. Higher self scored SA score? Also very BAD! That means the pilots in question are less motivated to improve, more prideful, less open to feedback. Compared 300 hour pilots against 10,000 hour pilots and the higher our pilots are going to have incredibly more SA. 300 hour pilots should be humbly looking to INCREASE their SA, not brag about it.
Again the tiny sample size makes this study statistically irrelevant, but the metrics portray a negative view instead of the positive one that this study was obviously looking for.
Having spent a good amount of my career time in a major airline flight simulation facility and knowing the limitations of modern flight sims, I question any such study conducted in them. The overriding aspect is the fact the occupants (trainees, pilots) know full well they’re attached firmly to the concrete with absolutely no risk to life and limb. That aspect can never be simulated. There is little panic reaction with the trainees fully expecting 'something" to occur. One only needs to refer to Sully’s testimony at the NTSB hearings when he reputed the difference between flying a simulator in know conditions vs. the human reaction when the unexpected occurs. That fact alone would cast doubt on this study. But haven’t we gone past all of this gender BS. Females have earned and are now excepted in the profession. What’s the point in this?
This article is click bait.
Scientifically it’s meaningless. Small sample size, no controls, no inclusion or exclusion criteria, etc.
Bottom line, regardless of training or experience no one can predict how an individual will react in an real emergency.
You make valid points, but I’d like to clarify that I did not state analog was better, I can agree it is different and my point was how those differences effect how data is interpreted in high stress moments. Yes, personally I prefer analog because I was taught on that style. the view is … cleaner … with less consolidation of data in one spot. Maybe this is research for me, but I am truly curious if any study was done indicating eye scan, data interpretation and action analog vs glass. I want to stress that a digital attitude indicator for which side is up and its ability to display more visual information on terrain or weather is a beautiful thing. I’ll take a line in the sky over a VOR arrow.
I’m not sure about your last point regarding “moving the needle”. What needle? If we believe if most of the news, there is a pilot shortage so it asks the question, do we not include women in pilot selection? Any pilot, male or female has to meet FAA standards for examination and licensing whether it s PPL or anything after requiring FAA certification. Some in aviation think that airlines “lower standards” for women or minorities, but as I talk with my male pilot friends, there are a few bad male pilots in both private and commercial worlds. (per your comment).
I’d rather this not be about which gender may be “better” and more focus on which human pilot does better and brings their passion of flying into their work.
Why was women’s [so-called] liberation infested with Godless Marxist communists bent on destroying our God-based, Free Enterprise USA? Because of their “Out of Chaos comes change” philosophy! What better way could Satan’s spawns break down a strong Church & Home nation, than to cause enmity between men & women? I.e., get women out of the Home so “education” can preach values to kids, i.e., Godless Leftist philosophy? Lower labor costs with more women workers! So now it takes two workers just to rent a chicken coop “home!” Then, with only school/ media to teach values, we get more crime, addictions, and homelessness needed to bring the “Change” needed to install a Godless Commie Marxist style slave nation, as history & the ever-repeating Bible stories demonstrate!
@JHull: Don’t discount womans intuition, sometimes that can save the day!
The most qualified person should get the job. Stable approaches and smooth, correct and timely responses to emergencies are certainly metrics to consider but they are not the only ones. Still, I like what this tiny study shows.
Race, religion, sex, etc, should never be considerations for hiring. Not in America.
Last, did this study finally answer the question, “What is a woman?”? I ask a serious question.
Excepting them would be unacceptable.
Like most of the other commenters, I find the results of the study interesting, but not very relevant to real world flying. The size of the study (number of participants) is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. But more importantly, it appears that each participant was a single individual in the simulator, rather than a team. What really matters in the real world is how effectively two pilots work together to manage routine tasks and/or emergency situations. Do two men function more effectively than a pair of women? Or, does a coed crew beat either same sex pairing? In a mixed grouping, does it matter if the pilot is male and the copilot female or the other way around? Answering those questions is far more relevant and could lead to ways to modify procedures that would benefit the increasing number of mixed cockpit crews.
KentM, is that your new nom-d’emesis here on AvWeb? We’ve missed your thoughtful insights.
Perhaps not, but I think such research should be very relevant to real world pilot HIRING.
Thankyou.
Interesting.
(But photo caption is contradictory - ‘flying’ or just ‘sitting’ without fastening shoulder belt?)
Poe’s Law surely applies here! Can people truly be that dumb?
The other factor that detracts from this “study” is the low time. These people are at the very beginning of their flying experience. So it introduces a significant variable - training. How long, where, what seasons, by whom on what aircraft? All very subjective but they all have a significant impact on a pilot’s abilities. What if the women were all/mostly from affluent families - lots of very good consistent training on good quality equipment in a short period of time? I started at 14 in Canada, in the early spring, working for 2.85$/hr. So weather played a factor, my ability to get enough money, it was an uncertified program, taught by hobby instructors if you will.
This, as it stands, is click bait playing on those that support or oppose DEI. I flew military just as women came in - many struggled, a few excelled. They were given extra time and attention and breaks their peers did not get. In the commercial world I saw good & bad pilots of both sexes. The women predominantly had easier more glamorous paths (a broad generalization).
We kicked off 2025 with two “non-stable” approaches in a CRJ that lead to one being turned into beer cans at YYZ and the other dragged a wingtip at LGA. Each was done by one of our Venetian aviators. In the B737 simulator they no longer turn off both A & B hydraulics for full manual reversion because our Venetian aviators don’t have the upper body strength to keep the blue side up.
Right. And she’s also “flying” the airplane with: 1) Several blank flight displays; 2) No one in the left seat (doesn’t look like a cockpit for single-pilot ops); 3) Taxiway centerline markings visible thru the windscreen.
Some of the methodology might be useful, but not the conclusions with respect to sex differences. The small sample size and low power means the study is not generalizable.
Well I can give my 2 cents as a researcher who does lots of statistical analyses. After a quick look at the paper itself, I think it’s clear these results should not be trusted. I think the study suffers from serious methodological flaws, in addition to being drastically underpowered.
On the front end, it lacks ecological validity. They ostensibly claim to be comparing men and women in emergency situations under high stakes. However, sims are certified for flight dynamics, not for reproducing stakes, fear, and consequence. In the box you know you’re safe, your job/life isn’t on the line, and there are no passengers to worry about. Thus, there are no stressors or pressures really being applied that would equate to a real emergency situation.
Statistically, they are seriously underpowered by small sample sizes. They only have 10 participants of each sex. In the text of the study they calculated post-hoc that they have no power to detect reasonable effects. What’s more, in such an underpowered study, you are almost guaranteed to overestimate the effects when you find statistical significance (and in some cases they go in the wrong direction of the true effects). Also, their sampling method is not random, but participants are recruited via convenience, which makes results un-generalizable even under large samples. To be fair, they do basically outright state that their results are meaningless in regards to generalizability. This means that the study actually cannot tell us anything about sex differences in piloting at all (something missed by the news reports on this). What the study CAN do is serve as a basis for future study design or hypothesis generation, but it cannot offer any conclusions.
There’s also several methodological problems. For example, when evaluating performance in the emergency scenario, they excluded 3 emergency crashes (2 from women, 1 from a man, leaving 8 women and 9 men) and then compared completion time among the survivors. So they essentially dropped 2 of the women’s worst outcomes. This is called “survivor bias”. A proper analysis would treat a crash as a worse outcome than a slow landing and also analyze time-to-completion with “failure” as an event itself, not delete them from the analysis. Especially with such a small sample, one participant’s performance can dramatically affect the group’s average. I strongly suspect dropping the 2 failing women almost certainly inflated their average scores, making this analysis unreliable.
Another thing they compare is situational awareness, but these ratings are self-reported by the pilots, not measured by the researchers. You can see why that estimate will be biased.
The methodological flaws would need to be addressed even with larger samples, but nevertheless the low power here means the results should be taken with a grain of salt until replicated with better sampling and study design. To be fair, the authors mention these caveats and limitations explicitly in the text, but of course news outlets and editorials do not.
Given it’s limitations, I don’t think we learn much about sex differences from this study.
Thanks.
Media types lack sense.
Media are sensationalist, often biased.
The study needed two additional groups to be valid, men transitioning to women and women transitioning to men.
The US is not ‘god-based’, the Founders were at most Deists - believed in supernatural causation but that humans could not influence it - iow prayer does not work.
The US is based on individual rights to a substantial degree, that was the fundamental change from Britain.
We all know that female pilots achieve peak performance by wearing the right shoes, utilizing the right headset and carrying the best aviation handheld radio.
Especially in exquisite high net worth environments, products offered by affilliate content, can enhance safety tremendously.
How can it be a legit study if the pilots male or female self reported their scores? Sounds like a waste of time.
Here’s my take. Keep in mind I’m recently retired military and international airline pilot, aircraft systems instructor and writer, with just under 19,000 flying hours. There is absolutely no aptitude correlation to gender according to scientific studies at NASA and other agencies (after decades of intense study). In my experience, approximately 30% of new pilot trainees don’t belong in the program (this includes male, female, white, non-white, etc…humans are humans). Another 60-65% are average, and the remaining 5-10% are extraordinary. These top 5% come in every sex, color, and social background…if you’ve seen the newest Top Gun movie, I think they got the mix right. One of the best pilots I’ve ever flown with was an African American male in the Air Force, and my best friend from my service days, another female pilot, was better than anyone in the squadron. One of the best copilots I ever flew with in the airlines was African American(and ended up being a chief pilot), and the few other female pilots were generally good to great. Sadly, there were also minorities that were not sterling…BUT in no greater percentages than the white males. This was before the big push to have a quota…what is now known as DEI. I will say that almost to a person, the minorities I flew with back in the 80’s were excellent…this being because we all HAD to be better to be considered even half as good. That doesn’t exist any more and the ones that don’t belong in the cockpit (that presumably cut the line because of their minority status) reflect poorly on the many other minority pilots that DO perform at top levels. And they are there, doing their jobs well and without any whining or drama, but get dissed because it’s assumed they got their jobs because they are minorities. So, that is why I feel the modern DEI movement, while having good intentions, is only hurting those it was designed to help. And it definitely has safety ramifications. The answer is not quotas. The answer is to give prospects from underserved communities the opportunity to train on the same level as those more fortunate, and when ready and properly trained, THEN they can and will compete on a level field, and excel. That is my humble opinion.
Excellent question.
Surveys with self-selecting respondents are not professional, cannot be accurate except by chance.
What confidence interval? Eliminated confounding factors? Eliminated observer bias? Were there outliers? (one very slow pilot would skew the results) Too many questions and not enough data. Possible, just not demonstrated with any statistical rigor.