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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
Are U.S. airlines giving women second-class treatment in first class?
Dec 8, 1997 | "Right from the start, you'll know you come first with us," United Airlines says in materials touting its first-class service. For first-class passengers, amenities include juice and cocktails before take-off; plenty of "inner space"; complimentary reading material such as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today; a sound system with "compact disc quality" and an individual video unit in each armrest, with six different channels. "Let's see," the airline tags on smugly after this bullet-point list, "did we leave anything out? We don't think so."
But some women passengers disagree. They would add one more bullet point to United's first-class list -- and to those of several other American airlines: "Complimentary gender discrimination, available from the moment you board the plane."
"When entering the plane, I'll have a briefcase and a portfolio and the man I'm traveling with will have the same, and he is met with 'Let me get your coat, let me do this and that, what would you like to drink?' before he even sits down," says Elizabeth O'Dowd, vice president and chief creative officer for BrightHouse, a consulting company. "And I will be ignored -- not spoken to and not helped."
For O'Dowd, who regularly flies Delta Airlines on business from her home in Atlanta to New York, the last two years have been filled with injustices: from having to prove that she's sitting in first class while the men around her waltz up to their seats unchecked, to flight attendants ignoring her pleas for help when she dropped a bunch of portfolios in the aisle. All of this, she believes, is because she's a woman.
O'Dowd is not the only one feeling slighted in the air. "There are just so many cases of flight attendants tripping over themselves to refill men's coffee and answering every whim and pretending that they don't notice my attempt to get them to clear away a tray or refill my coffee," says Katherine Joyce, who works for a financial service in New York and has also had problems -- mostly, she says, with United. "It's really a demonstrated sense of being second-class, of being unworthy of the same kind of attention."
"This really blows my mind, it's just not possible," says Denise Hess, an American Airlines flight attendant who usually works in first class. "How could a flight attendant get away with it? If you walked up and refilled a man's drink and didn't even ask the woman sitting next to him? I can't comprehend it."
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