I fly Southwest a lot, all of my information is on file – name, address, known traveler #, DOB, credit card, phone number… but every time I book it makes me select my gender. That’s literally the only field I have to manually enter.
I can’t imagine any privacy rules guidelines that permit them to store all of that other information about me but not my gender. Anyone have an explanation?
Probably because they want you to be free to choose whatever gender you feel you are the day of booking.
Moderator Note
Whether this is intended as a joke or political commentary, it’s inappropriate as a first response in GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Is it “Southwest” that’s saving all your information, or is it “your browser”
Generally speaking your browser (if you let it) will save a variety of useful information about you (first name, last name, birth date…) in order to populate form fields that are flagged as automatically populatable. This isn’t a function of the page your visiting necessarily - it’s saved for use in any page which has input fields for that specific data. “Gender” is not usually in that set. I’m not asked for my sex in most of the online sites I visit. And my browser doesn’t save that information … or any other site-specific information that hasn’t explicitly been saved
It’s southwest, I don’t let my browser save form information.
Eta: I also book a lot through the Southwest app, which has the same behavior.
In that case, my first default expectation would be something like “sex was added late and inconsistently to the design spec” (for instance, if it was in the interface and ticketing subroutine, but the DB designers weren’t told to add it as a database field, there wouldn’t be a place to store it from booking to booking and the behaviour would end up as you describe)
But it could be that someone else has more info on a policy or regulatory reason why it might be the case
I think I may have figured it out after poking around in my account settings. The short answer is that it asks for it every time because Southwest doesn’t have it on file. But I noticed that my name, gender, and DOB are all in a section that says “To change this information call us at 1-800-xxx-xxxx”. Presumably I could call and have my gender added to my account and then they’d stop asking.
I’m also assuming that I would need to call because they don’t want people changing that basic identifying information willy-nilly, because if you could then you could use your frequent flyer miles on other people, which they don’t want.
I thought maybe there was some bizarre regulation that prevented them from saving it but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. My bad.
Why does an airline need to know your gender?
It isn’t like they do anything different based on gender – the seats are the same (too crowded), the ‘meal’ is the same (lousy), the bathrooms are the same (cramped), etc. What possible use does the airline make of this info?
While I would have framed it differently, there are people that are in transition. What about if someone logs in after several years and is a different gender?
That’s what that 1-800 number mentioned earlier is for. Call and update.
Agreed. I was just saying that it’s not an unreasonable guess at the OP’s question. While this is GQ, until a factual answer is provided, I think we’re still free to ponder.
Some airlines do not (or did not) allow adult males to sit next to unaccompanied children. The cases I read about seemed to indicate that the airlines in question still did not know the gender of the persons involved at the time of booking. Consequently, the issue was generally resolved by asking the adult male to switch seats with another passenger.
You can read a bit about it at this wiki link.