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Journalism of Courage
Air Vistara found itself on the receiving end on Twitter after a woman took to social media to complain of gender bias in the airline’s website. Shyama Rath was filling personal details on a form on the company’s website when she found out that it would not allow her to select the prefix “professor” in the title as she had chosen “female” as gender.
The message on the site read, “Title PROFESSOR is not valid for this gender. Please change your TITLE option.” Taken aback by the message, Rath shared a screenshot of the reply on Twitter. “Common, #Air_Vistara,” she wrote.
The tweet quickly garnered a lot of attention online and many took a jibe at the airline. However, Air Vistara soon took cognizance of her message and apologised for the glitch, thanking Shyama Rath for bringing it to their attention.
Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer of Vistara Sanjiv Kapoor also apologised and said he was “mortified to see” it.
https://twitter.com/TheSanjivKapoor/status/1154224207296733187
Twitter users started to troll the company and opined somewhere a developer was “dead”. However, someone pointed out that the gaffe wasn’t restricted to females only and the “professor” tag wasn’t working for men either. Others also started a conversation on the gender binary.
https://twitter.com/freshgreenbeans/status/1154263187052613632
Later, Kapoor tweeted that the glitch had been fixed.
https://twitter.com/TheSanjivKapoor/status/1154284482557632512
