The Women in Aviation Advisory Board attended its final meeting March 21 and voted unanimously to submit its report to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The committee will be providing the FAA strategies and recommendations to support their efforts to get more women in the aviation industry, according to a March 21 FAA news release.
“I want to thank all of you for your service over these long months," Deputy Secretary Polly Trottenberg said. "We so appreciate your leadership. I am truly excited to see the incredible ideas this panel is going to come up with.”
Thirty women were selected to be on the board of advisors, and they come from different parts of the aviation industry and academia, according to the release.
“The steps that you have taken to ensure girls and women can enjoy the opportunities that are before us to join all of us in the aerospace industry are invaluable,” FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said. “The number of women in aerospace and aviation is steadily growing, and this is the most exciting time we’ve seen in aerospace in generations. We hope that the work we’re doing together will help to enable women to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.”
The FAA was directed to create a woman's advisory board in 2018, to bring women together and come up with ways to bring more women into the aviation industry, according to the release. The board was created in 2018 by Congress under the FAA Reauthorization Act.
“Recent decades have seen changes for women – a majority of graduates from college, doctors and lawyers are now women -- but aviation has largely not changed," Board Chair Dr. Heather Wilson said, according to the release. "Congress asked this committee to come together and explore why that is so, and to make recommendations on how to change it. Over nearly two years, this group of 30 women leaders from across the country, with collectively hundreds of years of experience in the aviation industry, have come together to do this work.”
