McArdle dismantles the notion that deregulation decreased the looks of flight attendants:
You could probably still get a large group of young, hot women to take a job that involves free flights all around the world. But those jobs are no longer open, because airlines stopped firing all the old, fat parents. Thanks to a combination of feminist shaming, union demands, and anti-discrimination laws. Moreover, once they no longer fired people over a certain age, union seniority rules immediately started selecting for older workers, in two ways: layoffs are usually last hired first fired, and older people have a lot of sunk costs in terms of pension accrual and seniority, so they're less likely to leave. If you fly a major airline, you'll notice very few stewardesses in their twenties.
Jess Zimmerman can't believe that we are debating the issue:
McArdle doesn’t mention another factor, which is that some of the beautiful women who would have been stewardesses in the Pan Am era are now allowed to be lawyers and scientists and crazy things like that. Outside-the-home work for women was just starting to ramp up in the early 60s, and there were limits on what jobs were considered achievable for the ladies.
A few readers provide further background:
Glenn Whitman's reading of the topic is ahistorical. A cursory glance at this "Timeline of Flight Attendants' Fight Against Discrimination," which is provided on the website for the 2006 book, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants by historian Kathleen Barry, reveals that flight attendants and their unions began fighting against limitations on their age, size, looks, and their gender, as early as the 1950s. Gail Collins's 2009 book When Everything Changed narrates how one of the very first complaints presented to the new EEOC office after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was by flight attendants. The NYT review of the book explains:
The commission’s clerical staff was "still unpacking when Barbara Roads, a union leader for the flight attendants, and another stewardess arrived. . . .'This woman came up to us, two blondes in stewardess uniforms, and she said, ‘What are you doing here?' Roads recalled. The two women . . . told them about the airline ban on marriage, the age discrimination and the endless measurements to check for weight gain. 'They couldn’t believe it.'
In a 1964 Congressional hearing, when airline executives testified that it was imperative for businessmen that attractive women light their cigars and fix drinks, Representative Martha Griffiths said, "What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?" and the conversation began to change.
The invisible hand of the market was not responsible for this change (which also affected men who wanted to be flight attendants); it was the direct result of union activism and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
A lawyer elaborates on that law's role:
It created the "customer preference" line of case law that basically said that whether or not a customer "prefers" a particular type of person cannot justify discrimination in employment unless it is a "bona fide occupational qualification", such as a type of actor (male/female, black/white, young/old, etc.) in a particular role. You may remember that several years ago there was a row about this with regard to Hooters, and they eventually convinced the EEOC that hot waitresses were central to their business – not being a restaurant serving food. Ironically, Pam Am was among the earliest airlines to get hit with a Title VII claim on this point, which means they probably had the hottest stewardesses back in the day.
The Dish 