Do you speak Airportese?

Airports, like much of our public spaces, are dominated by male passengers. So what happens to women there?

Most public spaces are designed for men. Most public spaces are also designed by men. When I say, men, I mean men who have little insight into what it means to live in a world that does not prioritize them. Hence, most public spaces are designed by men who are upper class, upper caste, able bodied, and identify as cis-het. In some cases, one might argue that not all public spaces were designed by men for similar men. It was the British, after all, who designed and built the railways in Bombay, for those unlike them. Although regular commuters were largely workers, in service of the colonizers, the vast majority of users were still male.

Recently, Melissa Arulappan shared a photo on Linkedin of a baby berth, installed on an experimental basis in the Lucknow Mail. The baby berth, designed for an infant, came across as dangerous for a sleeping baby. Arulappan wondered how many people would be comfortable sleeping with their baby on the berth additionally, wondering who designed this berth? Not a woman. Not a parent.

Examples abound of how public spaces and facilities are designed for men. It is only recently that I began to notice how the airport is designed for men. My grouse with the airport being a gender negative space, while at the very least it could have been a gender sensitive space (if not gender transformative), comes from the fact that airports and air travel for the masses is a fairly recent phenomenon. For example, the first train ran from Thane station in 1853, but the newest terminal in Mumbai airport, was inaugurated in 2014. The Bangalore airport in 2008 and the Delhi Airport terminal 3 in 2010. I wonder, then, why did these spaces turn out to be so distinctly masculine in their running, given they were built when feminism was quite a thing.

Who speaks Airportese

Lawyers speak legalese. Sometimes if you belong to a certain place and speak characteristically, in a particular style, you might speak, e.g., Brooklynese. Or simply, if you belong to Vietnam and speak the language, you speak Vietnamese or Nepalese if you belong to Nepal. Airportese, therefore, is the language spoken by those who belong to airports. It refers to the fluency in the usage of airports. Just like speaking in a language that one might be very proficient in, a person who speaks airportese, is proficient in using not just the space, and the facilities in an airport, but also how to take maximum advantage of these. Speaking airportese means that you know things that others don’t. You know, for example, what and where the lounge is, know exactly the size of your carry-on luggage, you have checked in a hundred years in advance (although not too early because you have to be just the right amount of busy to make time for these menial tasks) and you know exactly when your flight will leave. If you speak airportese, you are most likely a man.

Why men

Spaces are gendered and the use of these spaces is also gendered. There is a symbiotic relationship between the use of space and how much that space lends itself to the user. Women are not the highest users of airports. I looked for gender disaggregated data on the total air passenger numbers in India, and unsurprisingly, I didn’t find any information. But looking around me, I know that women do not outnumber men in the use of airports. Occasionally, there are more women using flights, but on a regular weekday, airports are full of men.

Women have access to certain spaces only based on responsibilities they have to fulfill in these spaces. Women do not choose jobs that require frequent travel as they have to attend to familial and household responsibilities. Think of the highly feminized sectors like teaching, nursing or retail- they don’t require travel. According to Prerna Siwach, mobility and gender roles are interlinked; it is gender roles which define the mobility of women and in this case, women’s roles in families restrict them from traveling regularly. The low numbers of women in the labour force, don’t help much either. Therefore, of the few women at the airport, some might be travelling for work, while others might be travelling for non-work purposes.

An implicit assumption at airports that women are not traveling for work, means that their time is less important than a man’s. Hence there are numerous and more orderly queues for men, while those for women, are few and often in complete disarray. In some cases, like in Bangalore (and in Delhi), there are no queues for women at some of the security gates. Hence, as a woman traveler in Delhi and Bangalore, you are sent to a carousel which is farthest away to deposit your luggage, while there is no queue for women there, which means you deposit your luggage and come back to join the queue for women. Of course, we live in a world where only two genders are normalized hence, I have no idea what an exclusionary space the airport might be for other gender minorities.

And so, as the airport is not where a woman belongs, she is constantly reminded of the ‘fact’ that she doesn’t speak airportese, while the men were born with the fluency. A woman might be fumbling through a genuinely faulty machine, and a trove of men will descend on her to introduce her to the magic of a simple QR code. The commentary on the position of the phone, its brightness, or the uselessness of the screenshot, is like information reserved and accessible only to men. The ‘mansplainy’ instincts of men, to help every woman out is on display as if the secret digital keys to the aircraft gates are only known and accessible to them- the forbidden apple housed in a man’s android phone. If you are a woman travelling with children you just don’t have the right to your space, privacy, or the joy of discovering new technology. You are nothing but a tech-dud dropped out of advancement to attend to the lowly task of feeding a baby. And so there will be that paternal man, somewhere behind in that line but ahead in airportese, to rob you of your joy of mastering a (rubbish) technology that is going to anyway become obsolete in a few weeks. It is as if, a mother travelling with children, is a reminder to men, about their place in the gender hierarchy and their role. They just have to be fatherly. If there is no man at the back, there is a security personnel by the gates, tch tch-ing at your out-of-placeness. It is endless.

Now what

Given that gender is part of the design of our public and private spaces, a few individual efforts will not bring about much of a difference. But as Francoise Verges, said, in her interview, you solve small problems in your part of the world and they will have an effect in other parts of the world. You can start by taking less space or taking more space depending on who you are. If you are a man, tone down a bit. Control your urge to help others by showing how much you know. Bungle a bit and in doing so, interrupt the narrative that airports are only for men. Of course, you’ll appear less manly, if it matters to you. As a woman, take more space. Glare back at those who teach you how to use your well-used smartphone. Or like me, fight with the CISF to create a separate queue for women, which obviously will be unheeded. If you are a gender minority, tell us what you’d like us to do. And let’s just hope the changed use of spaces will eventually change the space itself.