Others commented about misogyny etc. in India miss the fact that India is (a) not a monolith & (b) flights are too expensive for 80% of India’s population (yes, wealth disparity in India is that bad). So the men on flights are less likely to grope women than let’s say a man on a train.
I asked my Indian colleagues about this, and they said they’d use this preference for space (not purely safety). One of them also said men smell worse than women so she’d prefer a woman next to her.
Could it be prompts by devs are different from lay folk? For example, “write a website for selling shoes” would give a more complete result compared to “write a single page app with a postgres back end with TLS encryption” (or whatever), which would add more constraints & reduce the pool of code the AI steals from.