Unfortunately necessary. Essentially every girl I know has had at least one bad experience with a creepy uber driver. These are people that are entering their address and often their workplace into the app. It's a big reason why a lot of my friends are picking Waymos instead.
The other night at the grocery store a woman with a cart and groceries approached me in the parking lot, asked if I (a male) could give her a ride home. Was probably innocent enough, but I declined. No way I'm going to accept even the possibility that she'd claim I did something, with no witnesses. That's just the world we live in and it's sad in a way. No trust anymore.
I hope Uber drivers have in interior camera running in their cars, for their own protection.
This falls into the domain of the ethics of care. Sure change needs to start some place, but it doesn't need to be done recklessly. Nobody does anybody any favours by putting themselves in dangerous situations. To care for other people, to give them the attention they need you need to prepare yourself for it first.
This incident is creepy enough that I would also not agree to a give a random stranger a ride home, absent any additional context or mitigations. Maybe to avoid waking up in an ice bath with my liver gone. But, to not give a ride because of some perceived idea that they would claim you assaulted them or something is a bit "this person should go touch some grass" or whatever.
You need to develop some empathy and learn that false accusations can destroy lives and families. You have no right to force someone accept even a 1% chance that something like that happens, even if it's less prevalent than assaults.
It looked to me like RajT88 was participating in a rebuttal of SoftTalker's comment. I don't think that interpretation is "reading what you wanted to read". The place you put a comment has implications for what you're arguing.
In addition, your chance of being falsely accused is low. Your chance of being prosecuted if you are falsely accused is low. Your chance of being convicted, if you are falsely accused AND prosecuted is low. Also, the accuser's chance of being prosecuted for making the false allegation isn't that low.
We're talking about less than 100 cases per year. The real thing to be worried about is a false conviction for drugs or DUI. That happens way more often.
Nailed it. The amount of bandwidth men should dedicate to this is far lower than what women should be dedicating to it in terms of absolute risk.
That isn't to say you should not be thinking about making sure you don't put yourself in a situation where you could be falsely accused of something. I would say, if you are thinking in that way - spending some time making sure you don't do anything to make women uncomfortable is a good way to spend some of that energy as well - same goal, different thought process.
True, but I can control the order of magnitude of women being assaulted by me, I can't control the order of magnitude of women falsely accusing me of assault.
I've got to ask. Is this kind of violent crime common or perceived as common in the US? If a stranger asked me for a ride home here my first thought wouldn't be that they want to attack me.
The US has a pervasive culture of fear. It's a big part of why guns are so popular.
I have had countless discussions with americans about guns that go along the lines of "What happens if (insert extremely rare violent incident) happens?" and they all literally seem unable to comprehend that these are just not things I even think about at all, and they really shouldn't either given how extremely rare they all are.
But a huge percentage of the population does worry about being victimised constantly.
It is the main reason that despite the obvious financial benefits and my love for certain landscapes/areas of the US I've never had the slightest desire to move there.
Maybe this video[1] helps you understand this better: a lot of Americans live in constant fear. They live in one of the safest countries on Earth, but if you see the discourse around safety there, you would think that USA is a big cartel neighborhood.
Maybe the 24 hours news cycle is responsible for that, I don't know. It's pretty weird, though. And I say that as someone who has lived in unsafe neighborhoods in my native country.
Depends on the area. I grew up in a bad neighborhood and everyone was grifting. If you gave a random stranger a ride you would get to take a tour of the roughest places in your city and maybe a "friend" that sees you as a free taxi driver. It was rarely malicious, mostly just people were poor and didn't have access to transportation. But their friends and family can sometimes be pretty dang nasty.
It's wild how much this actually happened and isn't made up. It sounds so contrived as to be only useful for making a passive aggressive rhetorical point, but for it to happen in real life, wow!
If this happened in real life, the actual fear would be getting car jacked by her and the five guys at her "home." Not a false rape accusation that will be ignored by the police.
I had a very attractive young woman ask me for a ride once, I turned her down for safety reasons, I didn't even have to imagine what bad things might happen, this is just common sense.
Can you pick Waymos? I was in Austin with my daughter who Ubers quite a bit (because dear God there's nowhere to park in that damned city) this weekend. She called an Uber and a Waymo showed up and she was grateful because she prefers them too, but she said that she's not aware of a way to specify that you just want a Waymo.
Fully agree and am pretty disappointed reading replies on here. Anyone familiar with the demographics of this forum? What % male is it? If you have women in your life, ask their thoughts on this. It’s easy to not understand problems that don’t exist for us.
Yeah. You sure learn a whole lot of horrible shit about the world in gender-integrated social spaces. (Like how many women start getting unwanted adult male attention when they turn 12.)
If they use any social media like Instagram or TikTok, just ask them to show their DMs as well. I was a douchebag when I was younger, and that was the first step into realizing that I was not aware of the women experience as I thought as I was at the time.
I drove for Uber back in like 2016, right around when Pool was introduced. Picked this dude up and then had to stop to pick up another fair, he saw it was a woman's name on the app, and when she called me to figure out where I was at he immediately started yelling sexual stuff into my ear piece.
Of course she immediately hung up and cancelled the ride. I drove a few blocks in the opposite direction he wanted to go and threw him out of my car.
That's how he acted with me in the car. Can't imagine how he would have been alone with a female driver.
What does "creepy" mean here? It seems like we're lumping in claims of men being creepy with men committing violence. Being creepy in and of itself is not a good reason to institutionalize discrimination.
So Uber is finally dropping the pretense of "vetted drivers" and "strict background checks" and whatever else they claim in their advertising. It's good that women get this service, but I'd be pretty concerned as a man as well. At this point whenever I call an Uber it's a 50/50 whether the person and car listed in the app will be the one picking me up. A lot of times I wonder if the driver has a license or insurance at all. They've been churning through drivers so quickly over the last decade that it's now impossible to get new ones on the service without massively lowering standards and looking the other way when something comes up as irregular.
They're going to spin it as a concession of the lawsuits they're facing, and they're face plenty, regarding the sexual assault of women from drivers.
This isn't being done because they want to, users have been asking for this since pretty early in ridesharing history. They're pre-empting the lawsuits and their consequences
Lyft already has such a feature, and personally I've been getting into Empower more, which also has the feature. This app pays more for drivers due to not actually acting as a taxi company but simply connecting the driver and rider marketplaces, something Uber tried to do as well but failed due to legal challenges as well as keeping margin for themselves. Empower just charged $50 per month to drivers as a subscription fee for the service and then lets them keep all the actual ride money.
However, just as with a marketplace connector like TripAdvisor or TaskRabbit, your mileage may vary (literally) in terms of driver ratings and safety, due to Empower not doing as comprehensive background checks as Uber or Lyft, so it is up to your personal risk tolerance.
Sex is a protected class under Title VII of the civil rights act. And the supreme court recently said that even majority classes (men) are protected by this. Since Uber involved in the decision to send more business to female drivers than male drivers, this would seem to me to run afoul of employment discrimination (sorry we don't need as many men workers today, too many of you competing so market forces mean we're going to pay you less, etc).
Can someone explain to me how this is (or isn't) legal under Title VII?
It seems if this is fully legal because it's the customer making the decision, then pretty much any form of "in app" discrimination is legal as long as it's the customer doing the discrimination. How long till "I don't want a black/white/gay/etc driver" options show up?
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — George Orwell, Animal Farm
Is it illegal to set a filter for a female gynecologist over a male one? Or a male gym trainer over a female one? Or a massage service, hostel, sports team? Is it illegal to set a gender preference on a dating app? Is it illegal to issue a casting call for a female actor or model?
This kind of "discrimination" is a part of society, and has been tested in courts plenty of times.
I don't think you need scare quotes, this is discrimination. Discrimination isn't always bad. IANAL but it seems like these are cases where we just kinda ignore some laws, and society usually goes okay despite and in spite of it. Just my uneducated impression.
Could you link to some cases where this kind of thing has been tested? I have an amateur interest in law and this issue is puzzling to me. It's not at all clear to me why it's okay to discriminate against Uber drivers based on the genitals they are born with, but not e.g. their skin color or religion.
I think the lawsuits probably make sense. While you can claim that there is a statistical danger, you can make that same claim about a number of other protected characteristics. Would we allow riders to request only female, heterosexual, over 45, wealthy Quaker drivers, if that happens to be the statistically safest driver characteristic?
Car share apps could have a camera and audio on mode.
- The inside of the car is surveilled and made available for both parties after the ride.
- The intent is made clear, that this is to capture a trace of any harassment or misconduct. Hopefully making this statement puts all parties on their best behaviour.
- Any failure to comply by the driver, camera blocked or audio muffled, then driver gets penalised.
Does anyone have experience using this feature? I can't imagine it'll be easy to get matched with a female driver. From my own experience Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers are seemingly 99%+ men.
Only women can request women drivers? Ok. Will trans women and intersex people be allowed to request women drivers? They are an especially vulnerable group.
What about women drivers?
How will the boundaries of these classifications be determined, and what happens when someone tests these boundaries?
What I was trying to get at is that the class boundaries get fuzzy for both the riders and drivers. And where you draw the line will have consequences for both riders and drivers.
Are there many assaults on uber passengers because they are white? Are there many assaults on uber passengers because they are women? There is your answer.
the fact that skin color can be a proxy for socioeconomic factors does not change the statistics.
Do you investigate why a rapist has raped someone and then ignore it if the reason is socioeconomic factors?
If applying your logic on skin color leads to discrimination then maybe it's discrimination even when the discriminated party is males.
It doesn't but it contextualises them. An inability to recognise that is a signal.
Have you seen any correlation between socioeconomic factors and perpetrators of sexual assaults?
Recognising that one group commits the majority of certain crimes isn't the issue, as you said it's just stats. The issue is entirely in ignoring other factors.
The driving factors do exist though in the case of race which make filtering by it unacceptable. SA is common across race, socioeconomic status, etc. There are certainly some argument for some cultures encouraging beliefs that make it more common for them no argument here.
That said filtering out drivers of a certain race is unlikely to make any difference in your risk profile where women filtering out men is likely to make a huge difference in their risk profile.
Your average woman subjects themselves to a spectrum of sexual harassment ranging from cat calling to approaches - or even worse - by just leaving the house. Imagine them in gyms in workout clothing, or night club dresses in locked vehicles. If the solution is to limit what they wear, we're part of the problem
It's one of the relevant factors. It, and related facts, make it usually possible for a man to overpower a woman (and a predator self-selected for being somewhat above average in fighting ability might be confident of overpowering multiple women, or at least being able to get away in the worst case), which has implications for safety.
Typically? I mean sure, those spaces exist, but the typical "leftist space" is usually still drenched in rape culture, maybe with some pretense of not being so (ending up as a bad experience for everyone except the self-important people running it).
A similar uncomfortable reality exists in rightoid spaces where theres hemming and hawwing at articles like this being blindly misandrist, despite the evidence and statistics on a societal level that men overwhelmingly commit more acts of sexual violence on strangers and deserve higher even segregation (its not even close to the same ballpark), but alas, they flee the consequences and promote a culture that critiques their legitimate and statistically backed reluctance to participate (like this thread). Despite the name, cherry picking isnt that fruitful of an activity.
Honestly, thank you. I and many of my other friends have had this happen so much that we don't even react beyond an eyeroll, empty stare, or slight look of contempt for the perpetrator, when we tell each other the stories. I've had a ten minute drive in an unfamiliar city feel like an hour because a brief moment of conversation turned into a man repeatedly asking for my number, explicit details about where I live (not just the city, but the neighborhood, streets and even using phrases like "How can I find you if I visit?"), and my social media accounts. He did all of this despite clear, polite and repeated declinations towards his requests. He said things like "I'd like to be your friend" and further "I'd like to get to know you", and despite being firmly and clearly told, "No, thank you," each time he continued onward until the moment I stepped out of the vehicle. He was not subtle. It was very direct, and his tone sounded more and more frustrated as he persisted.
For anyone reading who has not previously considered it, please imagine what it feels like to be in a moving, locked vehicle you're not in control of, in an unfamiliar place, with someone who is much stronger and taller than you who's not respecting your verbal boundaries. What guarantee do you have it will stop there? What could happen if I truly upset him? How much more unpleasant could it become for me? Meanwhile, I'm paying for this. Even with the option, I'm still paying with the extra time I willingly choose to wait.
Considering that 90% of sexual abuse in Uber’s safety report was committed by men, it seems disingenuous to frame this as some unreasonably discriminatory “oh they just want to have their own space”.
Yes unless there is almost same amount of male only bathrooms. As member of most hated minority I can accept that there is correspondingly to population less bathrooms. So 51% of bathrooms should me female only and 49% of them should be male only.
this is actually an interesting problem for building designers, because the "fair" scenario of equal space for each ends up in too few female restrooms (assuming a natural split of clientele) because the men get urinals which can be packed in like sardines, the women don't.
Even if you go "fair" and have the same number of drains regardless of size you often end up with lines for the women.
Most large place compensate by putting in way too many toilets on average or just hope there isn't a crush-time.
The best place to see this in action is at a stadium with 50/50 fans during half-time or other break.
Are you saying it's not acceptable for a woman to choose a female driver over a male driver for a sense of her own safety?
Deep breath in... There are two types of discrimination. Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell, let's call them Type I and Type II.
Type II discrimination is the evil awful kind we rightfully rail against. It is "treating people negatively, based on arbitrary aversions or animosities to individuals of a particular race or sex..."
Type I discrimination is of the broader sort; "an ability to discern differences in the qualities of people and things, choosing accordingly." We run our lives with this kind of discrimination: is this food safe to eat? is this activity safe to participate in? do I trust this person given what I know about them?
>> Ideally, Discrimination I, applied to people, would mean judging each person as an individual, regardless of what group that person is part of. But here, as in other contexts, the ideal is seldom found among human beings in the real world, even among people who espouse that ideal. If you are walking at night down a lonely street, and see up ahead a shadowy figure in an alley, do you judge that person as an individual or do you cross the street and pass on the other side? The shadowy figure in the alley could turn out to be a kindly neighbor, out walking his dog. But, when making such decisions, a mistake on your part could be costly, up to and including costing you your life. [1]
This kind of discrimination is what we're talking about. I'd venture that not only is it OK, it is necessary. In this case, men that have had no background check, and whose form of employment is as an Uber driver are more likely to harass women (or do worse) than a female driver. Allowing women to make a selection based on this likelihood means that female customers that are alone can make choices to still use the service while reducing the overall risk.
Mitigation of this risk in normal taxi services take the form of background checks, bonds, and a chain of responsibility running from employer to employee to customer. It places more risk on the employer deliberately. Uber deliberately chooses to avoid this risk and responsibility. That choice is baked into their business model. That means enabling this kind of discrimination from their customers is a required feature of the service.
[1] Discrimination and Disparities, by Thomas Sowell
> Allowing women to make a selection based on this likelihood means that female customers that are alone can make choices to still use the service while reducing the overall risk.
I'm failing to see how anything you say could be used as a guideline to pick between "good" discrimination and "bad" discrimination.
The major distinction you draw between "Type II" and "Type I" is the fact that one is fueled by "arbitrary aversion" which is not a particularly useful distinction.
What if I denied entry to black people from my bar because ""they commit more crimes"" and ""are more likely to break stuff"", is it morally ok? Why not?
My opinion is that no, it's not ok because the majority of people punished were never going to behave in an uncivil way.
The same logic can be easily applied to this situation. Are men more likely to behave sexually inappropriately (which ranges from verbal harassment to assault)? Sure.
Is it the majority? Hell no, it's nowhere close.
(Of course it's worth nothing that the "majority" does not necessarily have 50.01%, it's just an arbitrary line you can draw as long as you are consistent about it)
The point I took away is that since the normal methods of "ok discrimination" are not available and Uber refuses to do the needful on their behalf, women should be able to "use the big gun".
The reality is that if Uber rapes are an issue, and something like this is not allowed, women will just stop using it entirely.
Or special Uberpods will be developed where the driver is completely encased and the passenger has a "auto drive to police station" button.
If someone is presenting themselves to you in person for entry into your bar, you have far more information to make a judgement on than the color of their skin... so it is not the same.
In the case of a woman coming into contact with some driver and volunteering location information like her home address, she has little to no information to make that judgement. Providing her just that bit of information, and allowing her to discriminate based on it, makes her safer. Ideally, she'd have way more information than just whether the driver is male or female. The reputation information helps, but isn't always reliable.
>If someone is presenting themselves to you in person for entry into your bar, you have far more information to make a judgement on than the color of their skin... so it is not the same.
So the difference between "good" discrimination and "bad" discrimination is the amount of information on which the decision is based upon?
Logically then uber could add a "white only" option, "no queer" and "no leftist".
(of course this is arbitrary but you can easily come up with a reason why: if you split any group of real people in two it's only natural that one group has an higher incidence of a negative trait)
This also has a second problem: what if we let the passenger know not only the sex but also if the driver ate fish in the morning (and hundreds of other useless facts)? Does that make it discrimination because they have far more information?
I guess not but then how do you decide what information is valuable in order to decide if there is enough information to judge the individual instead of going off statistics?
How can you say that our theoretical racist patron is in fact racist and not going off the only valuable information?
No, that's a question.
I imagine it's not that since the rest of my comment is dedicated to pointing out how that'd be racist.
I was trying to make you explain what exactly the difference is since you didn't clearly define it in your reply.
Uber is also the one deciding to offer a rideshare service where mens are banned for working for them. Uber has the choice between vetting their employees and doing discrimination based on a correlated proxy. They choose the latter, and this discussion is about whether that is legal.
If an employer did the same thing, would you argue that's also not discriminatory? Or, to pick a notorious example, if a cake shop only agreed to sell to straight couples, would that be the same? If not, why not?
These platforms connect service providers and consumers. That should be obvious, I think.
A better challenge would be if these same platforms allowed racial selections. Which I think everyone would be uncomfortable with in a way “let women avoid men” does not evoke.
Probably because of motivation. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence of racially motivated bad behavior on these platforms, but there certainly is for gender-based bad behavior[1]
So the apparently-similar hyptothetixal is not that similar, though still useful for rhetoric.
In your cake shop example, the more accurate version would be some gay couples only agreeing to buy wedding cakes from cake shops with gay bakers.
On account of it's the customer choosing the service provider, albeit with the help of filters provided by an aggregator, instead of service providers denying service to customers based on their belonging to a class.
edit: I missed that you can, as a woman driver, also filter out male riders.
My libertarian view on discrimination (independent of the Civil Rights Act) is this:
If a service is not widely available in the region, any systematic discrimination leading to refusing to provide service, or specific level of service or care, based on anything unrelated to the ability to provide it, should be illegal, locally, in that community. Rules like ousting disruptive customers apply across the board.
If a service is widely available, however, then “x-only” service providers should be allowed to operate (as indeed they are with women-only gyms, Jewish-only clubs, or nightclubs that let women in first and charge the men) as long as they advertise it up front and not make people go there only to find out that “ladies can go in free of charge, men pay $300 for a table with bottle service”
PS: replace “ladies” and “men” with “whites” and “blacks” and hear how that sounds. And no, citing crime or violence statistics shouldn’t play a role in shaping whether people can get into places, whether it’s women citing male vs bear violence / harassment or people citing racial FBI statistics on violence / harassment. This is the prosecutor’s fallacy.
Yes, I think the argument that "discrimination is fine so long as it doesn't result in complete shutout of a vendor/customer" is reasonable. But that argument didn't fly for the cake controversy case, so society doesn't seem to agree.
Absolutely wild that none of the dissenting comments suggest a means of lowering or eliminating sexual harassment of women passengers. Why not start there? Get creative.
The most effective way of combating this for Uber would be to start doing deeper background checks, live interviews, in-depth assessments, customized testing on their drivers. Mandate video and audio recordings in the car that's streamed to them. Impose harsh penalties on harassment, including immediate dismissal and mandatory police reporting. You know, act like a real employer.
Right now they have all the reasons in the world to be as hands-off on their checks as they can be. They don't behave like a business with employees. It costs nothing to accept almost anyone and then just weed out the worst of the worst to avoid brand damage.
But making these changes would cut into the bottom line too much. They want all the unemployable and dangerous people to work for them because they're so desperate that they'll accept the meager pay. So instead of making any deep, difficult structural changes, they ask the software team to add a checkbox to the app. The checkbox itself is fine by me, but it's just them taping over an issue that stems from the way they do business.
Do you have any compelling ideas on how to do that? I don't think it's 'wild' that people criticizing a company action aren't starting their comments with "here's how I'd fix society".
It would be cool if people have better ideas, but someone criticizing this workaround doesn't need to suggest something better, and it's not weird for them to lack better ideas but still post. It's a hard problem. And "better than nothing" might get an idea approved but doesn't let it escape criticism.
A divider's not gonna do anything. The threat of being in someone else's car is that they can take you anywhere, keep driving you around, harass and demand things from you. It's a position of trust. Not the same kind of trust as an airline pilot and their passengers, but there's still a large imbalance.
"As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all."
This same thing that keeps on happening when we try to reinvent things "without all that stuff that just adds friction." As with software, one should understand the underlying reasons for constraints in the old system before building the second one.
Banking -> crypto and NFT "without all that stuff..." -> wash trading.
Taxi service -> Uber "without all that employer stuff..." -> drivers with no background checks and no interview process
I understand part of this is routing around the damage of monopoly maintenance (medallion system, for example), but let's fix that instead of taking away the protections in place.
Sorry for the rant. I know this is like asking water to run uphill.
It happens with taxi drivers too. I know women friends/family that don't like going in taxis because of the unnecessary flirting and
harassment where with Uber it's easier to report and check by the driver's rating.
Hardly a rant. You're just describing the "move fast and break things" ethic (or should I say unethic). Or said another way: "all of the convenience with none of the responsibility."
It'd be hilarious if women formed their own closed rideshare economy; they'd discover that they demand much higher prices from each other than they get from men.
Since their passengers (women in this case) on average earn less, that customer base would be less likely to drive up the price. Also probably only a small percentage of the customers would choose this.
This might be mitigated somewhat by offering female drivers a similar options to limit themselves to female passengers. It would ovviously only work whwre demand is actually high enough.
There was a need to be perceived as well for women not needing to live in hostile prisons and that ended with women effectively not being allowed their own bank accounts.
I think this is blatant sexual discrimination. I appreciate the sentiment behind it, but it's discriminatory. Maybe if someone can request a male driver instead of female it MIGHT eventually balance out, but I don't see this surviving judicial scrutiny.
Can you explain why? I am surprised this kind of discrimination is allowed, too. I know some discrimination is allowed like for hooters, etc but that is more on the hiring side not on the customer options side.
Everyone is dunking on this, but nobody is really answering why offering a filter based on race (or religion, for that matter) isn't OK, but filtering on gender is OK.
It's not primarily discrimination, though if you want to describe it as a side-effect, sure. We live in an imperfect world. Sexual assault is horrifyingly common and even normalized in banter in our culture.
Whereas "black crime" is generally not based on reliable statistics because of overpolicing and luring you into a car is not exactly the MO there either.
Despite being only ~49% of the population, men commit:
Around 79-80% of violent crimes (based on victim perceptions of offenders in National Crime Victimization Survey data and arrest statistics for violent offenses).
80%+ of arrests for violent crimes in older FBI Uniform Crime Reports breakdowns (e.g., 80.1% in 2012 data, with consistent patterns in later years).
~88-90% of homicides/murders (e.g., 88% of known murder offenders in 2019 FBI data; similar in recent years where males dominate offender stats for murder).
> In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that opposition to homosexuality is part of BSA's "expressive message" and that allowing homosexuals as adult leaders would interfere with that message.
How does this discrimination factor into Uber's expressive message?
