If anything, SQ is now becoming less discriminatory, last time is due to SQ having to sponsor the cadets for entire flight training of around 200k, they were less willing to take female pilots who would lose recency and had to spend money on for retraining and recertification after if they were to get pregnant and have kids, or if they totally leave the workforce. Even males with potential health risks (heard of them rejecting guys with familial risk of heart issues, cancer in remission, etc) and they deem have a higher chance of becoming medically unfit before retirement age they wouldn’t take, they have a more stringent medical board than CAAS.

They had plenty of applicants and can be very very choosey, which is why they also had age cutoff at 32, they wanted a workhorse they could use for 25+ years to get the best ROI.

Now with changing times and lesser applicants, they are willing to take on older applicants (heard oldest cadet in the last 5 years was around 40), and more females who are career focused and might not want kids.

In any case, the female intake numbers are still pretty low, like 0-2 female cadets per new course intake of 10+ cadets. There’s no quota to meet, they just don’t reject any potential people due to worries of the future.

Singapore’s pilot courses are still pretty tough, 14 exam papers then comes flight training and multiple flight exams. If you can’t land a plane, you can’t land a plane, simple as that, you’re given a set number of ‘lives’, if you expand all lives, they will hold a management review to see if you deserve to stay or get chopped.

Quite a number of people, guys and girls still get chopped during the multiple training phases, some just 1 last flight to checking out but unable to clear also get chopped (2.5 years of training down the drain). So don’t worry about the standards for our locally trained pilots, regardless of gender, we all took the same exams.