Airlines continue to perpetuate 1960s-style stereotypes around female flight attendants.

In an episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’, serial womaniser Barney Stinson goes on a monologue about “hot” professions. Air stewardesses, he insists, no longer hold this dubious honour. Instead, the prize belongs to pharmaceutical reps.

Yet everywhere you look, from Britney Spears in Toxic to TV drama Pam Am, the role of female flight attendants continues to be surrounded by sex and myth.

This week, it emerged that British Airways may face action from union members over their uniform policy, which requires new female recruits to wear skirts.

A poll of BA staff in 2004 had revealed that 70 per cent would prefer to have a choice between trousers and skirts.

How did we get to a stage where, in 2014, it can still be part of a role requirement that women wear skirts?

Particularly for a role that, at its root, is about the safety of passengers rather than the dishing out of drinks.

British Airways is very far from the worst offender when it comes to uniforms. China Spring Air have their cabin crew dress up as butlers and maids.

Last year, staff from Qantas Airways complained that their new uniforms – unveiled and modelled by Victoria’s Secrets’ Miranda Kerr – were too sexy, too tight and too impractical.

Ever since women started working as air stewards in the 1930s, the role has been a glamorous one linked to many notions of femininity – that of caregiver, hostess and perfect wife-to-be – from the 1930s through to the 1960s.

Yet even if a mystical aura had always surrounded air stewards, it was from the 1960s that this role began to be overtly sexualised.

Airlines began to commodify female flight attendants in their advertisements, selling them as part of the product.

Braniff Airlines’ ‘air strip’ advertisement featured a woman taking off layers of clothes in a striptease style.

The infamous ‘fly me’ campaignin 1971 saw National Airlines’ display their female flight attendants as their number one commodity, with posters featuring attractive staff and the tagline “I’m Cheryl. Fly me”.

National Airlines even encouraged their staff to wear ‘fly me’ buttons. Some staff resisted by wearing ‘Go fly yourself’ badges instead.

And in order for reality to reflect the myth they were selling, airlines gave their stewardesses sexy uniforms too.

Southern Airlines had their female attendants wear go-go boots and hotpants.

British Airways female cabin crew flying from New York to the Caribbean in the 1960s wore thin paper dresses, which a recent in-flight magazine delightfully referred to as adding ‘to the in-flight entertainment’.

These advertisements continued even as female flight attendants successfully fought against discrimination, for instance in the US overturning rules about having retire at the age of 32.

Then in the 1980s and 1990s advertisements began to shift away from the beauty of the cabin crew towards the modernity of the airline’s fleet.

Fast-forward to today, though, and it feels we may have taken a couple steps back.

Not only are strict uniform policies still in place for several airlines, but some recent advertisements make the 1960s look positively feminist.

In 2012, Ryan Air launched their ‘Red Hot Fares and Crew’ advertising campaign, featuring scantily-clad and provocatively posed flight attendants.

Following a number of complaints, the advertisement was banned by the Advertisement Standards Authority as it ‘linked female cabin crew with sexual behaviour’.

The less said about this bikini atrocity by Russian airline Avianova the better.

In 2010 Virgin Airways, hardly a stranger to questionable advertisements, released a reality TV show, ‘Fly Girls’, which followed air stewardesses as they worked and travelled through the USA.

According to the Washington Post, the show seemed ‘determined to fulfil a set of demeaning, outdated stereotypes centred on stewardess fantasies’.

We’re talking about a job sector where in 2005 one in five women reported having experienced sexual harassment; these kind of advertisements were not and continued not being a bit of harmless fun.

According to the Secretary of the Flight Attendants Association of Australia, Jo-Ann Davidson, speaking out in 2010, they put cabin crew at risk of sexual harassment and abuse.

In the face of all this, the argument around British Airways’s new recruits not being permitted to wear trousers may seem trivial, and of course it pales in comparison to the behaviour of other airlines.

Nevertheless, the insistence on skirts and sheer tights is part and parcel of perpetuating the sexualised myth around female flight attendants.

The corporate branding of most airlines is built around glamour. That’s fair enough – but does glamour necessarily have to equate with skirts? Haven’t we moved on to a stage where trousers can also be glamorous and fashionable?

Air flight has changed – it is no longer the preserve of businessmen or some elite. And attitudes have changed – it is no longer acceptable to force women into skirts.

In short, times have changed; and it’s time for airlines to step out of the past.