[Jeff Higgins]

I'm going to stick my neck out here and undoubtedly be called some kind of male chauvanist pig as a result of what I'm about to say.

I have yet to meet the woman working in my profession that can even begin to hold a candle to the men. Not one, in darn near 30 years.

I'm an engineer, and I design tools and equipment used in the rework and repair of large commercial aircraft. Much of what I design is used to retrofit, rework, or maintain in service aircraft per some kind of a service bulletin. The really fun stuff, however, is what we call "incident repair". Fixing damaged aircraft. It is simply amazing what a creative pilot, ground crew worker, food service worker, mechanic, or whoever can come up with to damage these things. Some are more or less "routine" to varying degrees - skin replacements around doors damaged by food service trucks, lower aft fuselage damage from a tail strike, nose gear collapse from slamming it down too hard, etc. Some are really "out there", and typically seen only once or twice in someone's entire career.

Even the "routine" repairs vary significantly by the amount of damage done, and other problems uncoverd during the repair (corrosion and cracking in surrounding structure, old "repairs", etc.). It's just like digging into and old car, especially if the aircraft have changed hands several times, have been maintained by various MRO's of varying capabilities, and by carriers with varying wallets. Just like old cars.

The universal problem with women engineers in this environment is that they don't work on old cars. Hell, they don't work on anything mechanical, as a rule. I only use old cars as an example because this is a board for old cars... Anyway, women simply do not have the mechanical background in the real world that is essential to being effective in this capacity. Some men don't either, and they don't last around here, either. However, everyone who has made it in this whacky little niche has been a man - bar none.

We very much have to think on our feet, under a great deal of pressure when in the field. Just imagine dealing with a customer who owns a $150 million dollar piece of revenue generating equipment that currently isn't, because it's grounded. What we do is extremely time-sensitive, seat-of-the-pants, and often carried off with "locally available materials". And resources - machine shops, fabrication shops, weld shops, etc. It's "McGyver vs. Rube Goldberg" all the way, with points for creativity.

While we have had several try, I have never met a woman that can do this. They may very well be fine engineers sitting back at their desks doing "clean sheet" design work and whatnot, but they fall on their faces in the field. Should they be paid as much as the guys who can do it all, when we typically have to send a guy or two in addition to her anyway, just to cover these shortfalls? The guys are just as adept as the women when back home in the office, at that kind of work. Who should be paid more?