Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific Airways will have an all-male top management team when Director of Flight Operations Anna Thompson leaves for another role in parent company Swire Group soon, to be replaced by a male pilot.

Cathay CEO Rupert Hogg said there were no immediate vacancies on the top team but there were women managers a level below and diversity was valued at the airline, which has staff from 75 nationalities and is a supporter of the Gay Games 2022 in Hong Kong.

"I really feel strongly we need to be inclusive in the broadest possible way," he said.

"We need to do more around women and what makes work easy or hard and balancing out lives and all of that stuff. We are working on that at the moment."

Willie Walsh, CEO of British Airways and Aer Lingus owner IAG , said the industry needed to attract more women and that progress had been slow.

"Aer Lingus recruited its first female pilot in 1977... It's taken 40 years to get to 10 percent," he said at the CAPA-Centre for Aviation summit also taking place in Sydney.

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