Lady Pilots Better Than Men, Says The Science

What do you make of this headline? “Female pilots perform better under pressure, study finds“. Story opens thusly:

Female pilots may outperform their male counterparts in high-pressure flight situations, according to a new study led by University of Waterloo researchers.  

The findings challenge traditional assumptions in aviation and suggest that women pilots may have unique strengths that could be better recognized in pilot training and evaluation systems. 

“These findings are exciting because they push us to rethink how we evaluate pilots,” said Naila Ayala, lead author of the study and postdoctoral scholar in Waterloo’s Multisensory Brain and Cognition Lab.  

“We can’t assume that because two pilots are looking at the same things, they will react the same way. Our study shows that women may be better at keeping control and making decisions in stressful flight scenarios.” 

This is confirmed by all those stories we read as youth about brave female pilots, especially all those fighters pilots in high-pressure situations, including that one lady who tried to fly around the world and crashed somewhere near Gilligan’s Island a hundred or so years ago.

There is a peer-reviewed abstract: “Exploring gender differences in aviation: Integrating high-fidelity simulator performance and eye-tracking approaches in low-time pilots” by Naila Ayala and others from some conference.

Naturally, to make bold claims like this the lady researchers obviously lofted a bunch of men and women into the air, put them into combat and thunderstorms and had them ferry customers who refused to sit down during take off or landing, and then gauged performance of those pilots, discovering women came out ahead.

Close.

They asked the lady pilots if they did better than the gentlemen pilots, and the ladies said Yes.

Yes: they used “self-reported situation awareness (SA) in low-time pilots (<300 flight hours) using a high-fidelity flight simulator”. That’s like relying on a realtor’s description of a house, or believing a bio in a no-picture dating app.

The authors also looked at “differences in gaze behavior” using “eye-tracking glasses.”

Their method:

 Twenty pilots (10 female, 10 male) completed nine landing trials, including an emergency scenario. Results showed that females demonstrated more stable landing approaches, completed tasks faster in the emergency scenario, and had higher SA ratings, though gaze metrics showed no significant gender differences.

One emergency scenario.

Well, girls do better on tests than boys, which all know.

There’s not much more to this small Abstract, which is not yet an award-winning paper. But I was intrigued by one of the papers the authors cited: “L. Eliot, A. Ahmed, H. Khan, and J. Patel. 2021. The myth of sex differences in the brain: A meta-analysis of human brain structure and function. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 129 (2021), 23–30.”

Now if they mean myth in its classic sense of an organizing story that tells a beginning, then that paper could be interesting. But if they used myth in its modern sense of falsity, then we are going to have to question the authors’ sanity.

Forget everything else, and consider this. How did those authors, or the authors those authors relied upon, test differences between men and women? Ponder this for a moment before reading further.

Because, of course, they could tell the difference between men and women. If there were no differences between men and women, and the utopia of True Equality was reached, then the paper’s title would have been “We wanted to test the difference between men and women but we couldn’t tell them apart and had to cancel the research.”

The strategy of all these studies is to find points at which there is little difference between the sexes, however dubious those claims are, and then say “These are the most important points”, from which they imply, but never say aloud, there are thus no differences at all or of any importance.

We know this is true in the Girls Fly Better Than Boys study because the end their Abstract with these words:

These preliminary findings suggest that female pilots may manage task demands effectively under pressure and have important implications for addressing gender-based assumptions in training and recruitment.

Those “gender-based assumptions” are the result of people looking to the skies and seeing who has historically been the better pilots. Which, sad result, is not Equity, but a shocking “disparity” plain to all. Which is offensive to equalitarians. Therefore they have to find a way to say the difference everybody sees is not a real difference, and because there is no difference discovered in this-and-such artificial scenario, or indeed the Victims are even better, Equality reigns after all.

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