Indian airline gives female travelers option to choose seats next to women | Hacker News Reader

Indian airline gives female travelers option to choose seats next to women

cnn.com

45 pointspriyankanath49 comments

Buses throughout India have segregated seating for male (at the back) and female (in the front) passengers.

Subway trains in most metro-cities often literally have seperate carriages reserved only for women.

Most co-ed schools in India also segregate their classrooms by having girls and boys sit in distinct clusters of seats, perhaps a legacy practice inherited from missionary convent schools of the Raj.

Co-ed hostels are literally unheard of; and no landlord ever accepts explicitly leasing a flat/house to men and women together unless they are related or married.

Such physical separation between the sexes has been a long-practiced convention across a lot of domains in India. So when Indigo says this policy change is "to make the travel experience more comfortable for our female passengers", what this means is that they are trying to make air travel conform to the practices the female passengers have grown up experiencing in other modes of public transport and everywhere else, to reduce friction and needless culture shock for new flyers.

Wow some of these practices were in place in the Netherlands in the 50s when the country was still very traditional (also, women in a government job were forced to resign when they married) but I'm so glad they are no longer the case. Like not being allowed to live together without being married.

And of course now the whole gender thing is not as black and white anymore anyway. E.g. gender neutral toilets, there's no longer just 2 categories. So this kind of thing wouldn't make sense anymore.

I have many colleagues in India and especially the ones from rural areas are experiencing extreme pressure from their families to get married in their early 20s. If they don't hurry up finding a partner their families find one for them, and if they refuse they get discommunicated completely.

I find it really sad because most of them are living modern lives in Bangalore. They seem a bit torn between two worlds, one really modern like ours (Bangalore) and one very traditional where they come from. I know several of them have partners without their families knowing, and they drink and party also without them knowing etc. One of them did tell her parents about her partner and wanted to marry him but her parents objected because he was not from the 'correct' caste (they didn't even meet him). It seems to be a country deeply struggling with this transition and forcing young people into a way of life they don't want.

I'm really happy I didn't have to deal with that when I was young and I could explore the world as I pleased. I'm in my late 40s now and never got married (though I did have one very long-term relationship). Personally I strongly believe in the right of the individual to live their life as they choose free from social pressures.

Many say this cultural stigma and discomfort against casual interactions with the opposite gender is the main source behind the "pervy Indian male" stereotype. It is natural that a man won't have a comfortable presence around women if he was simply never raised with healthy female interactions, and such cases are unfortunately prevalent in rural India.

But it is true that there are extreme differences regarding this across the diverse sections of Indian society. The tech/management crowd in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad is practically indistinguishable in its tendencies as against similar crowds in the West, for example.

> I have many colleagues in India and especially the ones from rural areas are experiencing extreme pressure from their families to get married in their early 20s. If they don't hurry up finding a partner their families find one for them, and if they refuse they get discommunicated completely.

LOL, Is there some kind of massive inheritence waiting for your friends that they stand to lose if they don't get married on time?

> But it is true that there are extreme differences regarding this across the diverse sections of Indian society. The tech/management crowd in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad is practically indistinguishable in its tendencies as against similar crowds in the West, for example.

Yes I think also that Modi's conservative success is based on this, a lot of the rural hindus seem to view the tech centres as "cities of sin" and view them as running out of control. It is a very diverse country of course. They don't all emancipate at the same speed.

> LOL, Is there some kind of massive inheritence waiting for your friends that they stand to lose if they don't get married on time?

No, they come from pretty humble backgrounds generally, but the prospect of losing touch with their family is a much bigger deterrent as far as I understand.

One of my friends said her family wasn't really to blame either, as they would be ostracised in the village too. Not even for her 'living in sin' so to say (I'm not sure if that's even a thing there) but because her family attended many wedding parties and it's expected to reciprocate. There's a lot of social pressure on them too. At least this is how I understood it. I'm sure my understanding is coloured through the lens of my western background.

Showed this to my gf, she said Indian/Pakistani guys are the worst on Messenger/Whatsapp, like to always start the conversation with dick pics. So I guess this makes some sense but I do feel bit discriminated :D

I really don't understand these men who send the dick picks. Like does it actually work with some women? In my experience women tend to be very different to men in that regard, but I guess it has work some time because so many keep always doing it. I just find it really repulsive.

The purpose is not for it to “work”. The men who do this have not had success with women, and have grown frustrated and resentful. They feel powerless in this area. The only way they can reclaim power and feel better about themselves is to harass, intimidate, or harm women.

This hypothesis does not sound plausible and tells more about your own world view than anything else.

I tried it once 10 years ago, 0/1 success rate according to my datas

When I booked a long distance bus in Turkiye and in Azerbaijan, the interface showed me the gender of other people, and prevented me to sit next to someone of the opposite gender. There was also a special case for children.

As far as I understand, this is required by law, so Flixbus and other companies had to implement this feature.

So, gender equality is seen as a moral right and is required by law in some countries, while the same is seen as a sin and is forbidden by law in others.

Equality doesn't mean that everything is equal.

If you are 6'5 heigh equality could mean that smaller people sit or stand in front of you.

For woman it doesn't mean they have to go to military but could.

I don't really get the military part tbh. When I went to army back in my country where it was only mandatory for men (but they always love preaching about equality), many of the men were such slobs that random women would have been much better suited for it.

It's one of many examples were people get a wrong assumption if what equally has to mean.

Allowing woman or enabling them to do 'men' things doesn't mean they have to do the exact thing as men. Like carrying the same weight.

I'm not dismissive about woman in military at all but I'm also not in a country like Israel were it is common to have woman.

So, in your words "equality" does not mean "everything is equal" and you mention "military" as an example. Did I get that right? You think that requiring half of the population - purely by gender - to perform forced labor for 12 months... is an example of "equality"? I would say it's a rather blatant example of inequality!

I wonder how this will/would work with trans people. I hope it is done with suitable sensitivity and sensibility.

I'm not sure that society has reached a point where sensitivity and sensibility meet on trans rights topics.

I think it's unlikely that an Indian airline will be the first to solve this problem.

Trans people and trans right are such a US/EU and a few Asian countries issue and some say fad - they literally do not exist anywhere else as a matter of public policy or visibility.

You’re just downright uninformed then. See, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey Perhaps you consider it a fad because increasing visibility in Western culture/resulting culture war pushback has just now brought it to your personal attention. Just because you haven’t personally noticed them doesn’t mean trans people haven’t existed for hundreds of years in different capacities all over the globe.

These are not trans people like you see in the anglosphere.

The same way Alexander the Great or Telemachus or Sappho or any other ancient Mediterranean were not gay in the modern sense.

Western culture's version of trans/gay/lesbian/LGBTQ+ (awful term imo) is an artifact of that culture. And just because we look and act the same as others does not mean we are. It's like lumping the Middle East into one category -- when some inside wouldn't even consider themselves a part of it.

E.g. just because I enjoy sucking dick does not mean I'm part of the [insert country that I have nothing in common with]'s gay community. And frankly I don't want to be lumped in with it.

I think it's really close-minded to stereotype millions of trans people and treat them like a monolith. Culture shapes behavior sure, but trans people globally operate under similar constraints. Whether or not you consider yourself part of the global or <insert country> LGBTQ+ community is pretty irrelevant to bigots. There's no way for you to appease or become "respectable" in their eyes, even if you throw trans people under the bus. You're always gonna be a f*g to them.

> but trans people globally operate under similar constraints

Wrong. Absolutely not. There is nothing similar between the lives of a trans person in the Middle East or South Asia and those in the West.

> There is nothing similar between the lives of a trans person in the Middle East or South Asia and those in the West.

I don't have first hand knowledge, but actual trans people I've heard from who have lived in both South Asia and the West and are in community with trans people on both sides of that divide do not echo that sentiment, and particularly this upthread idea, "These are not trans people like you see in the anglosphere", has been attributed to a combination of a extremely similar (but with different local names used) process of third-sexing in both South Asian and anglo cultures plus orientalism applied by anglo observers to South Asian cultures and the third-sexing going on within it.

Perhaps your version of bigots, but I can handle the ones I interact with much better personally with a different approach than -- paraphrasing -- "fuck all bigots."

I think the absolutionist path is wrong. I don't care about the respect or acknowledgment of the monolith of the "other." I do care about the people in my community and those I interact with on a regular basis. In that vein, I have found it useful to not be so inflexible about things. The majority of people are open to getting along if you get along with them. The rest are either working from a memory of bad experiences or have just simply been surrounded too long in a dogma they've adopted as their own. But these are not intractable problems.

What is an almost intractable problem is having all of my efforts be made moot, when a bunch of hell-raisers with nothing else on their mind besides "me and my problems" decide to make noise and drive even greater decisiveness.

I would like for Western individualism and cultural imperialism and disintegration to leave me and my people the fuck alone. I don't need your help or your ideas or to be saved from my foolishness -- thank you -- I'm doing well with my own devices.

If you don't mean to say that trans people exist as a fad, you might edit this comment for clarity.

Really? I'm guessing very much not, given the track record of Islamic countries on LGBTQ+ issues

It’s more complicated than that, for exactly Pakistan recognizes a third sex since years. It’s just rather shitty how they do it…

> It’s more complicated than that, for exactly Pakistan recognizes a third sex since years. It’s just rather shitty how they do it…

Hijra (transgender, intersex, or eunuch) are recognized, but live at the margins of society on the Indian subcontinent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)#Social_stat...

What happens if no women were ok with sitting next to a man?

That depends entirely on seating capicity and layout and specific numbers.

Also whether male across aisle, male in seat ahead or behind is considered an issue. It's a constraint problem similar to paying extra to not be near children.

What is more expensive? Not having to sit next to a child or not having to sit next to a man?

Also: will IndiGo Airlines share with me, a guy, part of the extra money I help them make? ;)

Just ask them: https://www.goindigo.in/flight-booking.html

Block seating isn't hard to work out.

> Also whether male across aisle, male in seat ahead or behind is considered an issue

At this point, just don't fly.

Why?

Seating is already segregated by quality of service, if the demand is there it's no more difficult to block seat by other criteria.

Is logistics and constraint programming too hard for some?

Perhaps avoid container routing and ship stacking problems.

Then you may end up with the last seat only being available for people willing to sit next to a man. The odd man out can still share a three seat row with a woman if they sit in the window and aisle seats. But otherwise, apart from that last middle seat (or one of the seats in a two seat row) there shouldn't be any complications if all women spurned sitting next to men.

Given the tightness of airline seating and typical shoulder width for each gender, alternating male / female seating seems ideal space-wise.

This is what happens when you leave decisions with social consequences to engineers... they end up optimizing to strange anti-social characteristics at the cost of any sort of social reality.

We could save even more space if we hooked up seating arrangements to TSA body scanners. Using body outlines, seating could be dynamically adjusted before boarding to ensure each passenger can optimally interlock legs with their neighbors. Lap sizes can determine the ideal vertical stacking, with overhead bins removed to save space now that the top passenger can hold all the carryon.

This approach might take a bit of getting used to, but just imagine the carbon savings.

Oh, that's just standing passengers except they sit. May be acceptable in an intra-urban plane, but not on the long distance.

> it said it opened 96 in-flight sexual assault cases in 2023.

This seems a very low number; roughly on the same order as number of people who die in an air craft accident (that is: dozens or hundreds/year, rather than thousands or more).

Total cases opened was 512 by the way: https://www.faa.gov/unruly

Are you saying they are underestimating the number? Or are you saying that the number isn’t high enough to warrant action? Your comment isn’t clear.

I believe the first, they're saying that it's about as likely to report being sexually assaulted on a plane as to die in a plane crash, which seems extraordinarily unlikely to be true, and if it IS true, it implies that planes are already safe places, safer than most other environments you'll be in.

No, I just looked up how this number relates. Nothing more, nothing less. No assumptions or points to be made about anything. To what degree these numbers are reliably is not something I can reasonably judge.

Or they’re so unsafe that people do not dare report issues.

Or people being harassed don’t think it will help to report issues.

Or people being harassed think it might help, but statistically not so much that it makes reporting issues worth the added travel delay.

(This list likely isn’t complete)

Sorry, yes, my meaning was that it seems as though the number OP used to arrive at the conclusion is incorrect, either because OP made an error, or because of some reason that leads folks to under-report (as you suggest above), or because the data is wrong for some other reason.

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