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The Mozambique Airlines (LAM) are today celebrating their first woman commander, a rare feat in the world and all the more in a country among the worst in gender equality indices.
With pilot Admira António, 29, taking the helm, there were also Mozambique Express flights where the crew is entirely female – as there were already women in the position of co-pilot and assistant on board.
“This has always been what I wanted to be since I was eight years old,” Admira António says at an altitude of 11,000 metres, a dream that has had since she heard her older brother talk about flying.
It was because she never gave up the dream that Admira believes she has managed to win through in a male-dominated world and become a commander in 2018.
In the clouds, there are two realities. Almost 80% of the on-board assistants are female, but only five per cent of the pilots are, and the proportion of females in technical or leadership positions in aviation is even lower.
This was the scenario described by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) when they promoted the first global gender aviation summit in the last year.
Admira Antonio bears witnesses to this reality: when she entered commercial aviation at LAM in 2012, she only flew alongside men, which she even found natural after growing up “between brothers and cousins”.
But she still recalls episodes of prejudice, such as when a trainer apologised “for being a girl” when she tried to correct response in a theoretical class – and she remembers how it only gave her “more strength”.
“The attention is always upon you, as a woman. They want to see if you really know what you are doing, why you came here and if someone facilitated you“, the task describes in a more closed way than the men to prove “the fitness and professionalism”.
Admira António closes the cockpit door and lights up the seat belt warning to start the descent to Chimoio, central Mozambique, a regular 70-minute flight from Maputo on a Mex Embraer 145 with a capacity of 50 passengers.
Leaving the plane at the airport, some passengers realise that they have travelled with a totally female crew and say in English: “They are a powerful team.”
But Nárcia Mateus, 29, a flight attendant for eight years, says there have also been passengers questioning the fact that there are only women in the crew.
The answer is the professionalism demonstrated, she emphasises, in a plane as in other aspects of the life of Mozambique: “We have women occupying positions that were previously only masculine,” she says, defying the gender equality indices that put the country among the worst.
Mozambique ranks 136 out of 160 in the United Nations Gender Inequality Index, which combines health, labour market participation and access to opportunities.
The country has the eighth highest birth rate in the world, with 135 births per thousand women between the ages of 15 and 19, according to the UN Human Development Index.
A total of 48 per cent of women, ages 20-24, marry when they were under 18 – the ninth-worst rate in the world.
The indexes show that there might have been another Admira António, who, by this stage in her life, would never have been an airline commander.
“It was one of the things that made me pay close attention in school: I saw that a woman was expected to marry very early and to form a family and a home” and “if the home was not well, it was her fault,“ Admira says.
She studied and completed pilot training as far as the financial availability of the family allowed in South Africa, where she grew up, and then applied for the LAM/Mex scholarship that allowed her to reach the place she occupies today.
Admira was thus baptised before the astonishment of her father, who for the second time had twins when she was born, but today the name suits more to the fact to add admirers.
It is common for people to ask for a photograph with “the commander” and there are young people who ask for advice on social networks, a new role that Admira embraces.
“If I had a person who inspired me at the time, it would have made my path a lot easier“, she says, because “women often accept things as they are and do not try to fight for what they want”.
The LAM has 38 pilots and three are women, while the subsidiary has 18, six of them female, Tatiana Conceição, the co-pilot who returns to Maputo alongside Admira notes.
She says she is certain that, given her example, there will be more commanders in the company, and that other women will try to become airline pilot as long as opportunities are shared the same way as other professions.
The scholarship that gave Admira and Tatiana access to commercial aviation “is not divulged like others” in schools, perpetuating the idea that being a pilot “is an elite profession“, when it should rather be a dream from basic on, she adds.
With the plane parked back in Maputo, Sónia Motumbene, a 26-year-old flight attendant, summaries the position. “It’s an honour to fly with a female commander. The profession has nothing to do with gender.”
The crew of four women leave the aircraft to allow the men of the cleaning team to enter, one of whom comments: “You saw, it was just women“.
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