Female flyers to get priority boarding with Aer Lingus to mark International Women's Day

Aer Lingus will celebrate International Women’s Day this Friday 8th March by offering Priority Boarding to female guests departing on UK and European flights from Dublin, Cork, Shannon, Knock and Belfast.

Some 120 flights on Friday 8th March will see female guests along with any junior travel companions board their flight ahead of all others as a gesture by the airline to join in the global celebration recognising the achievements of women and promoting greater gender equality.

Aer Lingus has also re-iterated its commitment to supporting female talent across the airline, having last year launched its Future Pilot Programme and the Aircraft Maintenance & Engineering Apprentice Scheme, which both sought to attract more female talent.

Women now make up 48 percent of all employees at Aer Lingus and 33 percent of all leadership roles, carrying out important job functions across all areas of the airline including cabin crew, engineers, flight dispatchers, check-in and boarding teams, planners, IT, marketing, communications, finance, and logistics specialists to name a few.

 

Aer Lingus also has a strong track record of supporting female pilots: it was the first airline in Europe to employ a female pilot, and currently employs twice as many female pilots when compared with the international airline industry average.

To mark International Women’s Day at Aer Lingus, a number of events and initiatives were held during the week including, a talk by motivational speaker and former RAF pilot, Mandy Hickson, staff members were invited to bring their daughters to work for a day, to get a flavour of the varied career opportunities available in the airline business to young women starting out in their careers and a working parent workshop was facilitated.

Rachel Izzard, Chief Financial Officer at Aer Lingus said:

“We are committed to fostering female talent and encouraging greater representation across all functions at the airline. As a company, Aer Lingus is committed to attracting a wide breath of talent. This International Women’s Day we celebrate our diverse female talent and our female guests. We’re proud of the Aer Lingus Women's Network called LIFT (Let’s Inspire Female Talent), which has been an important catalyst to recognise, enable and support the career progression of women in Aer Lingus over the last number of years, with a number of initiatives and mentoring programmes. “