Steve Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, drew a lot of flak this past week for two things. One of them raises serious questions about the tradeoff between so-called diversity hiring practices and safety. The other concerns one of Kirby's hobbies and can probably be dismissed as irrelevant, although it contributed to the overall attention level he's been receiving lately.
Some videos alleged to be showing Kirby—a 56-year-old married father of seven—performing as a drag queen went viral, amassing 2.7 million views in only a few days. As I have no means of knowing whether these videos are authentic or when they were made, and I can't find any evidence that either confirms or denies their provenance, I fall back on a policy I once read which the manager of an ice-manufacturing plant told his employees in the 1920s: "As long as you do your work well during the day, I don't care what you do at night." While the CEO of a major multinational corporation may regret a time years ago when he dressed up in drag, I see no reason to draw any far-reaching conclusions from that fact, if indeed it is a fact.
Its chief use by certain media organizations has been to serve as eye candy for the related story, which should be considered seriously: whether United Airlines' stated diversity-hiring intents are so extreme as to cause their passengers unnecessary safety risks.
While I have not been able to locate the original June 2021 interview that is the basis of this charge, the closest I can find to a direct quote from Kirby is from something called "The Patriot Oasis" on X: "We decided that 50% of the aviation academy students would be women or people of color. Today, women and people of color make up only 19% of our pilots."
The issue here is whether a prestigious and demanding profession—that of airline pilot in this case—should be allowed to compose and propagate itself according to criteria that are strictly professional-merit-based, or whether one should also consider what for the lack of another phrase I will call identity-based factors. Questions like this are made clearer by extreme cases, so I will use an example to show what I mean.
In 1960, less than 5% of lawyers in the U. S. were female. Many law firms would hire women only as secretaries and legal assistants, and many law schools either had a policy of not admitting women at all, or making it very difficult for a woman to obtain a law degree. But things changed, and today, 38% of U. S. lawyers are women.
Similar things can be said about the professions of medicine and engineering. For a variety of reasons both historical and political, barring women from entering professions simply because they were women became something that was both frowned upon, and eventually made illegal by Federal and state laws. What once seemed part of the nature of things now seems highly prejudicial and arbitrary. In retrospect, the custom of banning women from the professions of law, medicine, and engineering seems to have few if any redeeming features, and undoubtedly lost the talents of many otherwise qualified women.
Lifting bans is one thing. But setting numerical goals for percentages of various identity groups is a different thing. Is it justifiable to arrange selection and admission processes to shift the percentage of various identity groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, social classes, etc.) in directions that appear to be desirable, not for the intrinsic good of the profession itself, but for an extrinsic good such as distributing the benefits of highly-paid prestigious professions among identity groups who have previously not enjoyed them?
If Steve Kirby's stated goal of his "aviation academy" students being 50% women or people of color is achieved, what are the consequences for the distribution of pilot quality among the graduates? Qualitatively speaking, if the total number of slots in the academy is fixed, and the selection rules are changed so that the fraction of women and people of color rises from whatever it is under strictly professional-merit-based criteria (presumably less than 50%) to the stated goal, some people who would have otherwise been admitted can't get in. I have no idea how hard it is to get into United Airlines' aviation academy, or what criteria one must meet in order to be admitted. Presumably, it includes a track record of flying experience and education, and perhaps some tests of professional ability.
The critical question is, does United Airlines maintain their professional-merit-based standards of admission and graduation and hiring while also managing to admit more women and people of color? To answer this question in detail would require months or perhaps years of research and access to information which is probably proprietary. But the answer is critical to our query.
If United raises their fraction of discriminated-against minorities by admitting and hiring them with lower professional criteria than those applied to other applicants, it is clear that quality is being compromised. But if they achieve their diversity goals only by extensive and intensified recruitment efforts, for example, and maintain the standards they held before the diversity initiative started, then there is nothing to worry about safety-wise.
There really is no other way to answer this question that I can see. And of all the various places I've seen or heard this topic discussed, no one seems to have carried the inquiry to the depths it needs to go in order to answer it with fairness both to United Airlines and to the flying public.
Maybe some investigative reporter is busily digging into the records as we speak, but somehow I doubt it. The drag-queen videos combined with a two-year-old interview quote have done their job of increasing Internet traffic to certain sites that are more interested in traffic than truth or objectivity.
In order to remain professions and merit the respect and prestige they receive from the public at large, professions, including that of airline pilot, must maintain their professional standards, and must also be perceived as maintaining those standards in order to retain the public's trust. This Internet-based kerfuffle about Steve Kirby has undoubtedly eroded that trust, but has left the real question of pilot quality unexamined.
Sources: I referred to a Fox Business report at https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/pilots-hired-based-merit-not-diversity-safety-top-priority-aviation-expert-says, the quote from Patriot Oasis at https://twitter.com/ThePatriotOasis/status/1747584074175107488, and for statistics on women in law at https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html, in addition to the Wikipedia article on Steve Kirby, United Airlines CEO.
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