Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023): Business & Management Studies: An International Journal
Articles

Gender equality for sustainable aviation: women managers' perspectives in Istanbul

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  • Habibe Güngör
Habibe Güngör
Assist. Prof. Dr., İstanbul Gelişim University, Istanbul, Türkiye
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15295/bmij.v11i3.2287

Published 2023-09-24

Keywords

  • Havacılık, Cinsiyet Eşitliği, Kadın Üst Düzey Yöneticiler
  • Aviation, Gender Equality, Female Senior Managers

How to Cite

Güngör, H. (2023). Gender equality for sustainable aviation: women managers’ perspectives in Istanbul. Business & Management Studies: An International Journal, 11(3), 1104–1120. https://doi.org/10.15295/bmij.v11i3.2287

Copyright (c) 2023 Habibe Güngör

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The United Nations General Assembly has emphasized gender equality to achieve the goals and objectives of 2030 sustainable development. Aviation is a leading sector in the Turkish national economy; therefore, a significant portion of Turkish labour is employed. Strengthening female leadership in the aviation sector, where women are not sufficiently represented, is one of the main elements of sustainability. Therefore, this study aims to understand women managers' experiences and obstacles in aviation companies and offer suggestions for the results obtained. In this study, the phenomenology model, one of the qualitative research methods, was used to reveal the main difficulties and obstacles in the career journeys of the participants. Ten female aviation managers, mid-level and senior managers in aviation companies, constitute the research sample. Content analysis technique was used to analyze the data obtained from the interviews with the participants. The results reveal that women who choose or will choose the aviation industry as a long-term career path have several issues to tackle. The main factors affecting their work capacity were the conflict of inflexible work schedules with family responsibilities and male-dominated culture. The results align with the literature stating that policies and regulations should be introduced to implement gender equality in the aviation industry. In the socio-cultural context, giving more visibility to executive women in the aviation sector and providing more female role models will change the male-dominated perspective of the society on the sector.

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