Amanda Hyde
When an all-male cabin crew worked a China Airlines flight from Taipei to New York last month, it was something of a coup. It didn’t happen by accident, nor was it planned by the airline. In fact, a group of the carrier’s more senior male flight attendants created the scenario themselves by all bidding to be added to the rota for that service, with female cabin crew agreeing to step aside.
The stunt was to commemorate a change in the policy of Taiwan’s China Airlines, which had previously limited the number of male cabin crew who could work on any single flight. Indeed, industry insiders believe this practice remains in place at other carriers.
That’s not always been the case. Far from it. In the early days of aviation, flight attendants – or “cabin boys” – were all male. The very first was waiter Heinrich Kubis, who had previously worked at the Ritz Paris and boarded a German Zeppelin in 1912 to serve passengers drinks.
“Since early flights could be a harrowing experience, it was thought that men could do a better job keeping passengers calm,” explains Cary O’Dell, who wrote the book Men in Pink Collars about men working in traditionally female-dominated fields.
It would be another 18 years until a woman took on the job. In 1930, Ellen Church became the first “air hostess”, aided by her qualifications as a nurse. She’d actually harboured dreams of becoming a pilot but was rejected because she was a woman (it would be another 39 years before Turi Widerøe was hired by SAS, becoming the first woman to work as a commercial pilot for a major Western airline).
A few years after Church was hired, in 1934, Nelly Deiner nabbed a position at Swiss Air to become Europe’s first female flight attendant (she tragically died during a flight in the same year). But it wasn’t until the Second World War, when men headed off in large numbers to fight, that women began to populate the cabin, leading to a gender imbalance that still permeates today.
The rise of the ‘trolley dolly’
This is no “worm that turned” story. The social climate of the 1950s and 1960s created a particularly sexist cabin crew stereotype. It was the era during which hostesses were trained at “charm farms” and the term “trolley dolly” was coined. Meanwhile, the job description stipulated that women had to be young and unmarried – sometimes only taking the role for a couple of years.
While women dominated the cabin, men got to rest on their way back from important business trips. One 1966 United Airlines advertisement read: “You went to sleep after dinner. Why not? You work hard. When the flight landed, the stewardess smiled goodbye like she really meant it. She does. She even straightened your boutonnière. You get this kind of ‘extra care’ every time you fly with us.”
At the same time, a moral panic triggered by the highly publicised murder of gay Eastern Airlines steward William T. Simpson in 1954 gave American airlines an excuse to stop employing men. By the 1960s, many operators refused to have men working in the cabin. The situation would later be exacerbated by the AIDS crisis.
O’Dell explains: “During that time, US-based airlines did a lot to keep men (all men, since all male flight attendants were considered suspect) out of the cabin either because they feared they were HIV positive or that their customers would be fearful of them being HIV positive. Also, airlines did not want to take on the healthcare/insurance cost of HIV positive men; so, it was just easier to not hire any man.”
According to research in a 2007 paper by Phil Tiemeyer at the University of Colorado Boulder, an airline executive testifying in 1967 was comfortable enough with the industry’s gender roles to tell a tribunal that “anyone who has ever been on an airplane and anyone who has ever seen an airplane knows that this is a girl’s job … a young and pretty girl’s job”.
With attitudes like this, it’s no wonder that the tasks which cabin crew perform – from dealing with sick passengers to executing emergency protocols – became trivialised, and men who wanted the job became stereotyped as effeminate.
This stereotyping has had a lasting effect. “Growing up in the 1990s, if you said you wanted to be a flight attendant, it was often met with stigma, like only gay men did that job because it was seen as a woman’s role,” says Jay Robert, senior cabin crew for a European airline and creator of the Facebook group A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge, which has 1.5 million followers. “Even today, many airlines are still holding on to those golden-age stereotypes in their marketing, which does not help. Because of that continued female-role stigma, many men still shy away from applying.”
O’Dell agrees. “The exceeding expectation that all male flight attendants are gay is something that keeps straight men out of the profession,” he says. “It would be a very good job for many heterosexual men – there’s the travel and, to be blunt, the access to a great number of single women – but the possible blowback about their masculinity from friends and society is more than what many hetero men want to take on.”
A 2024 report by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) highlighted that women accounted for just 5.1 per cent of licensed staff in aviation (pilots, air traffic controllers and maintenance technicians) during 2021, but cited figures produced by the US Census Bureau which suggested that 74.9 per cent of flight attendants were women. In Australia, that figure rises to 77 per cent, according to federal government data.
‘Passengers prefer pretty legs to beards’
During America’s civil rights movement, men keen on a career at 35,000 feet started trying to overturn unfair airline recruitment policies in the courts.
Among them was Celio Diaz Jnr. Keen to become a “male stewardess”, he initially lost a gender discrimination case against Pan Am in 1970, with the airline arguing that women were better at “providing reassurance to anxious passengers, giving courteous personalised service and, in general, making flights as pleasurable as possible within the limitations imposed by aircraft operations”. (Reporting on the case, one journalist at The New York Times claimed that “statistics showed that passengers overwhelmingly prefer pretty legs to beards”.) Diaz Jnr won on appeal.
Slowly, men started returning to the sky. “I started my career as a flight attendant in 1974 when it was very unusual to see males on US carriers working in the cabin,” reads one comment on Jay Robert’s Facebook group. “We were harassed, snickered at, ignored or sometimes even pulled from our assigned flights by pilots who refused to have us aboard.
“Our female colleagues were our protectors, mama bears fiercely protecting their cubs. I went on to fly for nearly 40 years and I am forever grateful for their friendship and affection.”
Meanwhile, as a 1978 New York Times article confirmed, men changed their minds about how difficult a job it was once they saw other men doing it. “It wasn’t until I saw my first steward that I began to take seriously the fact that these people are there for public safety and not just for drinks and decoration. And I’m still hesitant about asking a steward for something when there’s a stewardess around,” one frequent flyer told the paper.
You’ve got male
Some airlines have been slow to move with the times. “The recent China Airlines all-male crew gained so much attention because it was not an airline marketing ploy, and it happened in Asia, a part of the aviation industry that still reverts to many sexist and outdated rules for cabin crew, which the Western world began abandoning in the late 1970s through the 1990s,” says Robert. “Up until this decade, it was very rare to see male cabin crew in Asia, and if they were on the plane, they were often kept in the galley and out of the cabin.”
Remarkably, a handful of operators still only employ female flight attendants. During an attempted (and ultimately failed) relaunch in 2022, Jet Airways explained its choice as a cost-cutting measure that enabled employees to share rooms. India’s low-cost carrier IndiGo puts its all-women crews down to weight (and therefore fuel savings), as well as its wider efforts to hire more females (it also has around double the number of women pilots to the industry average).
Robert sees things differently. “To me, it is deeply disappointing that in 2025 we still have massive airlines … that have the nerve to advertise that they fly above the patriarchy because of their female pilots, while on the other side of the door they only allow females to fly as cabin crew, thus bending right back into traditional patriarchal roles for women.”
However, many operators are now committed to more balanced gender roles, with coaching firm How To Be Cabin Crew claiming that more men are entering the profession. IATA’s 2024 report stated: “Some airlines have also included a commitment to employ more males in the cabin with a commitment to ‘not less than 45 per cent of either gender’.” It could signal positive changes going forward.
“I now see many heterosexual young men taking on the role, when in the past it would have been far more rare,” says Robert. “Also, younger passengers simply do not care if the person looking after their lives in the sky is male or female, as long as they are competent and professional – which is how it should be.”
Requirements for being a flight attendant in 1954
Earlier this year a Reddit user went viral after posting the “qualifications for stewardesses” at Chicago and Southern Air Lines in 1954:
- Single – not engaged
- Between the ages of 22 and 28
- Between 5 feet 2 inches (157.5cm) and 5 feet 5 inches (165cm)
- Between 100 and 120 pounds (45 to 54kg)
- Good eyesight (no glasses)
- Good teeth
- Good figure
- Slender legs
- Natural colour to hair
- At least four years of college or two years of college and two years’ business experience
- The ability to carry on a lively conversation
- Good carriage
- Even temper – must not be provoked by demands of passengers
- Willing and anxious to please
- Willing to transfer
- Citizen of the United States
- Excellent health
- Clear skin
- Nice hands
The Telegraph, London
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