On the occasion of the International Women’s Day, all-women Swissport teams are handling aircraft on the tarmac in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Sydney, Australia. There are also two specialized all-women's teams on duty in San Francisco, U.S., on the tarmac: the operations control center and the cabin cleaning teams.

To mark today's International Women's Day, a 12-woman strong ramp team in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Kenya, will welcome and handle Lufthansa flights LH590 and LH591 between Nairobi and Frankfurt, both of which are operating with all-female flight and cabin crews. In addition, the team in Nairobi also handled a United Nations Humanitarian Air Service flight, managed by the World Food Programme and operated by 748 Services, which provides humanitarian support in difficult times. Earlier today in Sydney, Australia, a 4-woman ramp team handled an all-female Qantas flight QF431 to Melbourne.

In San Francisco, two all-women operations — the control center and the cabin cleaning teams — are on duty on the tarmac. With this initiative, Swissport wants to highlight opportunities for women and inspire more women and young girls to pursue a career in the aviation industry.

"We are looking for 30,000 people to join our company worldwide by the end of the year. These are primarily frontline positions in passenger services — check-in, gate — and ramp handling such as aircraft-towing, fueling, baggage handling and de-icing services," says Christopher Rayner, Swissport’s Chief People Officer. "At Swissport, we want to appeal to all genders and support women in their careers, especially in technical areas, such as aircraft maintenance, where women currently make up only a small percentage of the workforce. We also remain committed to developing many more women into management positions."

While women make up the majority of Swissport’s lounge staff (69.2% by December 2021), and almost half of our staff in aviation security (46.8% by December 2021) and centralized load control (43.8% by December 2021), women are still underrepresented in the company’s classic airport ground services and cargo handling units. At the end of 2021, 34.2% of Swissport's ground handling employees were women. In the more than 100 Swissport air freight centers around the globe, 28.6% of the workforce was made up of women.