Promoting Soaring (Among Women) | Kudos MASA!

Many of us were deeply disappointed with a recent post on RAS with respect to women. I felt it was very counterproductive to the goals and desires of many people to promote soaring.

Instead of engaging in that sad discussion, I reflected on some of my experiences surveying clubs in my region and how they have promoted soaring among women. Over recent years, I have given presentations at many clubs and had the privilege of spending a day learning about their cultures.

With respect to gender demographics, most clubs are unsurprisingly strongly male dominated, *with the exception of one*. And that is Mid-Atlantic Soaring Association.

When I visited them on the 4th of July, I noticed that they had quite a number of families and young women learning to fly. The gender balance of boy/girls among junior students was about even.

That got my attention and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out why this club was such an outlier.

The busiest bee that day was Cathy Williams. She flies an LS8, though many know her in the 1-26 world as a routine competitor, having flown in over a dozen 1-26 contests all around the country. And that day I learned that she was the Chief Flight Instructor for her club and the president of WSPA.

And on the flight line it showed. Everyone listened to her. The male instructors showed a begrudging deference to her and a high level of respect.

Moreover, sitting around and listening to the conversations among the instructors and students, MASA's culture was friendly and inclusive. It was not a "Boy's Club". That is not to say boy's clubs are inherently bad or evil, but that's what most soaring clubs are, intentionally or not. And the attitude at a boy's club is not so much that women aren't "welcome", but that they have to abide by and tolerate the boy's club norms to stick around.

Not so in MASA. There was little to none of the crudeness that is associated with many social organizations. The young women were very comfortable around the older male instructors. And it was a very fun place to spend an afternoon.

I only spent an afternoon at MASA and there is probably much more to their story as to how they became this way. I am sure that many people other than Cathy contributed quite a bit to MASA's healthy social culture. However, I don't think even Cathy quite realizes how much of an impact she has made by being the leader that she is and it really showed that day.

This is not to say that every club has to have a strong female leader to achieve this result. That said, I thought it was revealing that while many organizations have a stated goal of promoting soaring among young pilots and women (or both!), that they don't realize how much they are interfering with accomplishing these goals due to their social cultures. And MASA, a club that apparently had resolved these issues one way or another, is doing very well toward promoting soaring among young pilots and women.

I don't think that MASA's accomplishments are a coincidence and it may bear some self-reflection among the soaring community to consider how they operate if they want to accomplish the same goals.

All the best,
Daniel