Lessors struggle with gender balance

How diverse is aviation finance? Not very, is the honest answer, as even the most casual glance around any large aviation conference will confirm. Aircraft leasing continues to be a heavily male-dominated industry. A survey conducted by Ishka among European head-hunters active in the leasing space indicates that approximately 25.1% of the aircraft leasing roles placed in the last three years were for women. 

Lessors and airlines discuss diversity

 

Diversity is an issue that Advancing Women in Aviation Roundtable (AWAR), an industry association formed of aviation finance professionals, believes the industry needs to address. AWAR wants diversity to be spoken about more openly and makes the point that diversity in the work place also makes good business sense.  

 

Studies by Mckinsey have shown a positive correlation between a company’s financial performance and the proportion of women in its management team. The same study states that women use five of the nine leadership behaviours that improved an organisation’s performance, more often than men. These include: people development, expectations and rewards, role model, inspiration, and participative decision-making. In contrast men were more likely adopt two behaviours: individualistic decision-making, and control and corrective action.Various studies indicate that having a diverse workforce ensures a wider array of perspectives, provides a varied leadership style, and helps reduce staff turnover, but AWAR says despite these obvious benefits firms still could do more in their commitments to having a diverse work force. 

Ishka hosted an AWAR round table earlier this month in New York. Participants highlighted that the two key broad issues facing the industry was how to hire more diversely, and how to retain diverse talent by changing work cultures and habits.  Delegates at the AWAR conference pointed to advances in other sectors including the Rooney Rule, a policy that requires teams in the US National Football League to interview minority candidates when hiring head coaches, that has helped promote more black staff into senior roles in American Football. 
 

Source: Ishka research 

 

Recruitment firms state that aircraft lessors do want a more diverse choice when hiring candidates but it can be hard to offer lessors a wide selection of female candidates for certain roles because of the historical gender imbalance inherent in the industry.   Keith Garry, managing director at Peak Performance Recruitment, explains: “Often we get suggestions they want to balance out the team with a male/female ratio with their new hires. However, the candidate pool they can pick from is not really that big in order to give a large choice needed for a diversified workforce.  So you have to start thinking outside the box. Finding a female candidate to be a leasing marketer is harder than other roles because there is really only a limited number at the moment. However, it is easier in legal or a contract roles where there appears to be a wider choice.”

Murrae Ross-Eskell, managing director at Horizon Executive Search, which specialises in recruiting for senior leasing executives, agrees. She explains that many of the female candidates Horizon has placed are in either legal, finance or contracts roles. She states that the amount of travel or being forced to relocate to another country has put some female candidates off marketing or technical roles, primarily because they can lose their support network, but states she has had some success in placing female candidates into aircraft trading roles. 

 

Women make up less than a third of new leasing hires

 

Ishka’s survey was based on two European headhunters willing to share numbers in order to create an aggregate percentage across all leasing roles.

The survey appears to be the first of its kind in the leasing space and Ishka plans to do a repeat survey including a greater number of recruitment firms from different regions to better reflect the global leasing industry.  Other recruiters have indicated that the 25.2% figure drops considerably for more senior management roles, but the Ishka survey, at present, does not easily accommodate the relative seniority of position. The general consensus among the recruitment firms is that lessors do appear increasingly open to hiring more female candidates and want to create a more diverse work force. The gender imbalance is perhaps the most obvious issue for new leasing hires but lessors still need to make strides in terms of promoting wider diversity.

“Diversity is not just about women. It should really be about pushing general diversity, be it religion, gender or ethnicity and we are slowly getting there. Leasing companies are quite lean but there are slow improvements,” explains Ross-Eskell.

 

Source Peak Performance

The Ishka View

The survey provides a snapshot into a gender imbalance that appears prevalent across aircraft leasing, and appears to be the first of its kind for aircraft leasing. The survey is by no means a complete picture across all leasing companies and only relies on the figures produced by two, very active, European executive recruitment firms.  Lessors appear to be engaged with the issue but as the AWAR event revealed last week there is a lot more that the aviation finance industry could do. Even adopting policies such as the Rooney rule, which is a commitment to having a diverse slate of candidates for new hires, would help promote more female candidates into leasing jobs. Ishka plans to repeat the survey on an annual basis and include more firms to provide a more representative picture of hiring practices across all leasing firms.

 

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