Major US airlines to make gender option on tickets more inclusive

Major US airlines to make gender option on tickets more inclusive

Several US-based airlines have announced they are in the process of changing customer identification on tickets.

In a push to be more inclusive to guests, heavy hitters like United and American Airlines will make it optional to leave gender as male or female—as well as unspecified or undisclosed.

In similar form, Virgin Australia said in a statement it is currently investigating technical requirements that would be needed to enable a non-binary gender option for bookings made on their site.

Qantas also announced in 2018 under the recommendation of the Diversity Council of Australia that they would be phasing out “gender-inappropriate” terminology.

This involved removing words like “guys”, “love” and “honey”—each being gender-specific—from their staff vocabulary.

To avoid excluding members of the LGBTI community, partner and spouse were deemed more appropriate than husband and wife, while parents was preferred to mum and dad.

The transformation was encouraged by the Diversity Council of Australia, who approached nearly 150 companies around the nation—including Qantas—to change staff behaviour.

To influence wider societal change, the Council encouraged honesty, urging staff to “recognise reality” over the arrival of Europeans to Australia.

“Describing the arrival of Europeans as a ‘settlement’ is a view of Australian history from the perspective of England rather than Australia,” the Council said.

All in all, this harkens toward a more general and thorough view toward changing organisational behaviour by recognising culture, gender and race in all its forms.

If that stands for equality and acceptance—whose to argue with the recommendations?

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