A female pilot has spoken out about an incident where an airport employee mistook her for a flight attendant.
Sabrina - who goes by the handle @sabrinaleej on TikTok - shared a video of herself in her uniform and sitting in the cockpit of a plane, explaining a mistake a fellow airport worker made towards her.
"Gate agent looked me in the eye today, asked if I was the flight attendant," Sabrina wrote in the overlay text over the video, adding, "(Common occurrence)."
The pilot further elaborated on her thoughts about the experience in the caption of the post, writing: "It’s jarring to me because they work at an airport. You know what the pilot uniforms are."
Check out Sabrina's TikTok below:As of this writing, the clip garnered more than 1.7 million views and over 181,000 likes, with many online users in the comments sharing their thoughts on the situation.
One user wrote: "With three stripes? nah that was on purpose."
A fellow flight attendant also shared their opinion, writing: "As a flight attendant, I’m offended for you. Unacceptable. They KNOW our uniforms."
A third user commented: "But the uniform is so different... they knew what they were doing."
Meanwhile, other users poked fun at how Sabrina should have responded to the gate agent’s remark.
One person jested: "Ask them if they’re the janitor?" While another person joked that she should've said: "'Oh honey noooo… this is a PILOT uniform' real slow and nice."
Lastly, a third user chimed in and wrote: "I would've replied 'no, I'm not, are you the pilot?' and when they say no, reply 'obviously, cuz I am'."
In a follow-up video, the pilot said that while she loves her co-workers, she's not the only pilot that has been in that same position. She also explained that simply being labeled as a flight attendant wasn't the problem that she wanted to address.
"Being called a flight attendant is not an insult," she wrote in the overlay text of her video. "It’s an insult when it’s used to try to put me down after all my hard work. When you do that, you are insulting both me and the flight attendants."
According to Harvard Business Review, this kind of behavior is classified as "role incredulity," which is described as a gender bias in which women are believed to be in a supporting role - in Sabrina’s case, a flight attendant - rather than a leadership position.
The report also explains that when this happened, women have to spend extra time proving themselves within their role and asserting their position - which is what Sabrina had to do when someone thought she was a flight attendant.
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