“INAER FORMS SPAIN’S FIRST ALL-FEMALE MEDICAL HELICOPTER CREW”
This certainly caught my eye when it landed in my inbox yesterday afternoon, courtesy of bcm public relations.
The gender of an air ambulance crew might not be important to many people both in and outside of the HEMS (helicopter emergency medical services) / aviation industry, but it’s worth taking a look at.
Pilot Beatriz Parera, and medics Gloria Palacios, Salobrar Sánchez and Rocio Ramos (pictured below) make up the team at the Malpartida medical base in Cácares, which is operated by INAER Spain.
INAER boasts that this is Spain’s first ever all-female air ambulance crew, but they’re quick to add there’s no quota-filling agenda and the new crew forms part of a skilled operation that runs 27 medical aircraft across Spain.
Parera said: “The gender of the crew doesn’t matter; what matters is the way the crew and the health professionals work together to ensure successful missions, like those we’ve seen over the past few days.”
Quotas for encouraging gender diversity have always fired up debate, as mentioned in my post on the Women in Public Life 2012 conference, and this announcement sits well and truly within the framework of the now-familiar discussion on equality in the workplace.
Should there be such a public announcement on an all-female aircrew, or should we carry on as normal? In an equal world, we could do the latter, but right now this story is fantastic news and worth celebrating. It also deserves some cross-examination.
Proclaimed as a first in Spain, we should question why it is such a rarity that it becomes newsworthy. Why are there significantly more men in medical aviation than women, across Spain and indeed the world? Does this story represent a changing industry and a realistic growth in gender diversity?
This is where quotas can be useful in moving from rarity to equality, and we shouldn’t be afraid to openly practise them. It would be absurd to say that the lack of women in aviation is down to a functioning meritocratic system. The numbers are low because of a lack of opportunity.
Somewhere along the line an opportunity has arisen in Spain for highly skilled women to join a medical aircraft team; enough to form an entire helicopter crew.
Let’s hope this is a sign that more women will consider the aviation industry as an open door and, in the near future, we will see more women across all of INAER’s 27 bases – and around the world.
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propellers and prose 