Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Towards an Employment Equity Discourse

Abstract

In 1974 the British Government merged BOAC and BEA to form British Airways (BA), which began operations with just under 59, 000 employees, of whom approximately one in four were women. The airline had one female board member but very few female managers, and most female employees continued to be ghettoized in the clerical and support staff sections. Strong barriers remained against the employment of female pilots and engineers. Corporate imagery of the female employee continued to focus on physical attractiveness, and the ‘sexy stewardess’ remained a central theme in advertising campaigns. Yet beneath the advertising image of the new airline things were beginning to change. The percentage of female employees was growing, with women entering jobs and ranks previously confined to men. When, in 1991, BA announced that it was taking part in Opportunity 2000 — an initiative aimed at improving the number of women at all levels of management — it was reflecting the momentum that had already taken hold in the company. How that momentum got started and how it was mediated by competing discourses of culture change, merger and privatization is the subject of this chapter.

[The] workplace equality movement is essentially contradictory. On the one hand sex equality is a demand women make on their own behalf …. On the other hand it is a policy introduced into organizations by owners and managers ‘on behalf of’ women. Though some employers are genuinely concerned with justice, often it is transparently clear that it is organizational ends they have primarily in mind. They aim to improve recruitment and retention of women whose qualities they perceive themselves as needing. Or they just want a good public image.

Cynthia Cockburn (1991: 16)