Air Vistara Apologises After Sexist Automated Message on the Company Website Goes Viral

Air Vistara faced severe backlash when a female passenger complained of gender bias on their website. Twitter user Shyama Rath was apparently filling a form on the company's website where she was asked to fill in her professional and personal details.

However, the form would not let her select "professor" as an option after she had selected her gender as female. The message displayed on the screen said that that title was not available for the female gender.

Wait, what? Is this the fifteenth century?

Rath took to Twitter to express her fury and captioned it, "Common, #Air_Vistara."

Air Vistara, however, quickly responded to the matter and apologized for the discrimination. They also assured Rath that they would be looking into the matter.

Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer of Vistara, Sanjiv Kapoor, also replied to Rath and said that he was mortified to see something like this.

However, turns out, this was a glitch in the code or in the system which did not allow people to choose "professor" irrespective of the gender. A user pointed out that it did not work for the male gender either.

Nevertheless, others weren't too forgiving anyway. Some also highlighted the lack of a "third gender" in the options that had been provided.

Kapoor later replied saying that the glitch has been fixed: