My Navion’s gear and flap speed is 100mph, so it takes some finesse to get it slowed down with a big bore Continental up front. I’ve been working on getting the gear down closer to the airport so I’m not  dragging it in from too far out.

  Place the prop full forward and reduce the throttle (MP) and that effectively acts like a speed brake, and will slow the plane down considerably.

I grew up in the 60s and enjoyed model rocketry. I think some here also did, so you may enjoy this video:

I guess my thinking is if women may not be succeeding in some fields it is far more likely to be a matter of socialization than biology.

....There is biological reason that women can't do math and physics.  There is nothing about having two X chromosomes, or having the bloodstream diffused with estrogen (fun fact, estrogen and testosterone differ by exactly one methyl group).  .....
 

(I think you meant there is no biological reason.....)

I think there is something about gender that makes an innate biological difference in interests.  From birth, boys have different interests than girls.  Our closest primate relatives show the exact same thing. In chimpanzees and in monkeys and baboons, male babies and youth spend much more time rough housing with their friends than do females, and young females have intense interest in newborn babies, and constantly try to "borrow" them from their mothers, whereas the male young show far less to even no interest in babies.

If you accept evolution, and you accept that in the tree of life homo sapiens is very, very closely related to other primates, you cannot ignore the similarities with human children, where girls prefer dolls and boys prefer trucks and trains and toy guns. It is very hard to argue that the monkeys and apes are "socializing" their babies to prefer roughhousing or play auntie to younger babies. Likewise, studies with human babies have pretty much conclusively shown that gender differences exist from birth.

So yes, I think there is a biological reason women are less likely to prefer math and physics, but I agree with you that there is no biological reason women can't do math and physics.  They can.  Likewise in monkeys and apes, the female NHP youth do engage in rough house play, just not nearly to the extent the males do, and the males are capable of carrying and caring for babies, they just don't go seeking it the way females do.

Saying that all women think the same way and want the same things is insipidly stupid.

Absolutely. But we are talking about averages, and tendencies in large groups. There is significant overlap. There can be a statistical likelihood that any one individual fits the norm, but you cannot state conclusively about any one individual.

You can't say all women think the same way any more than all men do, or all blacks think the same way or want the same thing. But you cannot ignore majority behavior either. To me it is equally wrong to force an individual to comply with that majority behavior, as it is to try to force them away from it from a misguided notion that they "should" be more "equal" to the other gender. Both are wrong.

This is hugely important to us.  The pilot population has been decreasing for decades.  If we're to stem this tide some out of the box thinking may be required.  Half the population is 6% of pilots, despite the fact that many have the wherewithal and I bet would make better pilots than lots of the men.  There isn't some biological impressive keeping women out of the cockpit, its how they're treated by society.

There is biological reason that women can't do math and physics.  There is nothing about having two X chromosomes, or having the bloodstream diffused with estrogen (fun fact, estrogen and testosterone differ by exactly one methyl group).  It is something about how they're treated by their fellow humans, and if we can figure out what that is we might have a big new group of potential pilots.

The problem with tendencies in large groups with a bell curve distribution is that when something requires a high score on a certain parameter, you will get much more meaningful differences at either ends of the distribution. Let's say interest in math and physics is on bell curve. There is a curve for men and there is a curve for women and all the individuals are represented somewhere on those curves, but the mean for men is higher than the mean for women.

Then lets say you have an occupation that does not require any particular outstanding strength in math or physics. The number of individuals that would be able to do that occupation is very large, of both men and women, because in the average range of the ability the bell curve peaks for each are nearby and the proportional difference between them is small.

But let's say there's an occupation requiring a high degree of interest and knowledge of math and physics. If you pick a cutoff below which the individual is unable to perform, now look at the tails of the two bell curves and you will see proportionately many more individuals in the curve that is shifted more to the right, in this case, males.

This is why males are disproportionately represented in certain fields requiring a high interest in STEM or a high level of motivation to succeed (overly represented as CEOs). It might not be discrimination against women AT ALL.  It might just be that the abilities to perform are along bell curves that are different for males and females in a biologically innate way.

This does not mean men are worth more than women. On other scales women are superior. Women score higher than men in nurturing, and in intuition, and in certain communication skills, and in some kinds of judgment. Women are more likely to pick up on subtle signs of illness in others. Women are better at reading emotions on faces.  Women see the world more holistically, men see it more in terms of linear logic. (Incidentally I believe this is resulting in large numbers of primary care female doctors moving toward a more integrated approach to the patient, and I think it's a very good thing, because male doctors have too long viewed us as sets of unrelated systems ie: GI, neuro, cardiac, etc., all having little to do with each other, which is turning out to be a disaster, while men are still fantastic at fixing linear isolated problems like surgically removing a brain tumor.)

It's not good or bad but it is biologically innate, I believe, because innate gender differences exist through other species and there is no reason to believe humans are exempt.

But to your question about pilots.  I believe you are correct that looking to engage more females to want to be pilots is a possible solution. I think the biggest problem is that we are no longer producing enough young!  The population is aging and we in the first world are barely at replacement reproduction, under it in fact in many places. It has become a crisis in Japan for example.

If you accept the notion, as I do, that being a pilot requires a certain level of interest in STEM plus a certain level of intelligence plus a certain level of health, there is a limit to the proportion of the population pool that can be pilots. As you go out to the right on the STEM bell curve, you'll have a larger portion of your pool male.  On the health curve possibly the female pool will be larger. Intelligence is fairly even between the genders but there may be a slight edge of males on the top and bottom ends.

Any one individual may vary from the averages of his/her gender, so there will be females interested in math and physics but there will be fewer of them. The challenge is to make sure the ones that do, have the opportunity to follow their interest. The challenge is not to try to create unnatural interest in STEM in females who otherwise aren't.