I don't think FA is a great job for a mom but it's not as horrible as pilot. FAs can switch shifts between themselves and dial up or down their hours with relative ease. Pilots have a lot less of this flexibility.

The schedules have negligible difference with respect to your original argument. So if busy schedules are why there are hardly any women pilots, why is the gender balance the exact opposite for flight attendants? There are reasons, and they aren't all because "men bad", but your initial argument is 100% not true based on the simple counterexample of flight attendants. What is being "papered over" is this: why, given the same schedules, are women under-represented in the higher paying, higher prestige job?

> why, given the same schedules, are women under-represented in the higher paying, higher prestige job?

Why do you believe they have the same schedules? There's no rule that says when a pilot follows one flight with another flight, all the flight attendants have to join him.

I don't think there's all that much inherent value in having several flights flown by the same pilot -- if anything, it's the reverse -- so I'd tend to suspect that the rarity of female pilots owes more to the fact that pilots come from the Air Force.

FAs have very interesting schedules. As they work up seniority they have a ton of flexibility in how they space apart their required minimum number of shifts/overnights. Trading shifts and bidding for shifts is common. Additionally at some point in their seniority ladder they can start getting a regular set of shifts that get them back home to base daily, with occasional overnights.

I suspect this institutional flexibility is actually a natural consequence of the gendered nature of the role.