EVERY December, more than 1,000 female high school students, some as young as 15, take part in a “bikini competition” held in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao. The event, hosted by Oriental Beauty, a modelling agency, provides a platform for aspiring flight attendants to show off their bikini bodies to eager recruiters from the Chinese airline industry. Those deemed the most attractive are invited to join a fast-track flight attendant trainee scheme, which can open the door to a dream job at one of China’s big airlines.
Many Chinese and other Asian airlines shamelessly exploit female sexuality. At China Southern Airlines, air hostesses must be 25 or younger and must not have “X or O shaped legs”. Stewardesses at Japan Airlines need to have “good skin complexion”. Indonesia’s flag carrier, Garuda Indonesia, refuses to hire older, married women. VietJet Air, Vietnam’s low-cost carrier, requires that its female flight attendants be under 30 years old, be between 1.60-1.75m tall and apply “bold makeup”.
If any airline in America or Europe today were to adopt such discriminatory hiring practices, it would doubtless be greeted by a deluge of lawsuits. A flight attendant's job is to ensure passengers’ safety and security. A pleasant demeanor and an ability not to spill coffee on passengers' laps are also handy. But the fact remains: sex sells. For some passengers, the aesthetic qualities of flight attendants are an integral part of the overall quality of service.
Some Western airlines seem to recognise as much, even if they are reluctant to admit it publicly. Ryanair started selling in 2008 an annual charity calendar featuring its most glamorous female flight attendants, all skimpily dressed and in seductive poses. Despite being popular among its passengers, a public backlash ultimately forced Michael O’Leary, the airline’s boss, to scrap the idea in 2015.
Others carriers' hiring strategies can be open to interpretation. Swiss International Air Lines stipulates that its flight attendants must be of “a normal weight”, ostensibly for safety reasons. There may be a legitimate reason why cabin crew cannot be overly obese: the aisle of an aeroplane is sometimes just 51cm wide. But in what some might consider a Freudian slip, its online recruitment page explains: “We don’t require a particular body mass index, but instead look at the candidate’s overall appearance.” The cynical might be forgiven for seeing in such vagueness a license to cherry-pick the most comely.
Female cabin crew, it goes without saying, should be chosen for their abilities not their allure. But beyond basic equality, there is also a darker side to the sexualisation of women working at 30,000 feet. According to a recent article in Vice:
The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF), who represent over 600,000 aviation industry workers worldwide, say the most common complaints they hear from cabin crew relate to "physical contact and inappropriate advances." Most of these are anonymous and don't mention the airline, as many flight attendants are fearful of losing their jobs for speaking out.
As one airline employee puts it, the dark force that drives such assaults is “the pernicious trope of the flight attendant as a sexual conquest”. Beauty pageants and semi-nude calendars are part of the problem. Modern passenger jets have come a long way since the 1960s. Time for the attitude of the airlines that fly them to follow.
