Lyft’s new feature lets women and non-binary riders request their driver’s gender

I was gonna say, regardless of weather or not it provides more good than bad, it puts the driver in a position to be a target.

Couldn't broke drivers just self-identify as non-binary for more money?

I think a lot of straight cisgender men think that they understand the anxiety women and visibly LGBT+ people face in these sorts of situations. And maybe they understand it at some academic level. But they really don't truly grok it, and how it affects people's lives.

I don't doubt you had terrible experiences related to sexual harassment, and I'm sorry for you. Nobody deserve this.

But don't try to muddle the issue here. You have been attacked by people. And you decided that the pertinent group to understand these attacks is their gender, so we need to differentiate on this basis. You could have analyzed it along education level, wealth, apparent race, apparent religion, social persona, zodiacal type, car brand, profession, haircut, or anything else.

But you chose to judge the risk level of people based on their gender. Because you think that, for some reason, you have a much clearer perspective than other people you know litterally nothing about but their gender. It is the exact same thing that makes people discriminate others about the color of their skin, or wealth, or any of the illegal type of discrimination. You are using the same logic, and by extension, you are legitimazing it. There's a reason discrimination laws do a blanket ban of this kind of thing, and not "some genders/races/others are more protected than others" : it's because every use of every kind of this arbitrary categorization strengthen every other.

Where are you from that all of this shit happens?

You would think someone who has surely faced so much discrimination would be less of a bigot.

I'm not sure how blatantly enabling sex discrimination is going to help things here.

Technically nothing. There is no gatekeeping in being non-binary along the lines of presentation. But you claiming this as a passenger does not effect the other passengers who are made to feel safer by the adoption of this option. A fair number of female drivers in the service are also still likely to drive for male clients regularly anyway.

However if all drivers have protections for drivers to shut down abuses by scummy clients who use the opportunity of a temporarily captive audience to be disgusting towards drivers then this overall becomes less of a concern.

Almost all forms of accommodation leave certain paths open for abuse by bad actors. Erring on the side of the person who needs additional help participating in society is usually the more ethical choice because while a bad actor can be a pain there's usually already laws on the books or policies that can be enacted that allow you to deal with one. For the person seeking accommodation the cost of not having access can mean the world becomes a smaller and/or more dangerous place because of reasons that have nothing to do with them. In some ways that can emotionally be looked at as "letting the assholes win".

Well you see, most people aren't assholes.

In that scenario, I would guess when the driver sees you they wouldn't let you in the car.

Drivers tend not to be the ones sexually assaulted.

How is a man asking for a woman driver abuse? Maybe I really fucking hate having to ride with dudebro cabbies and having to humor them with their inane conversations and would prefer a woman driver.

Wouldn't that make you extra liable for getting sued, because on top of whatever the driver claims you did, you also specifically chose the option you shouldn't have chosen?

Like it's basically adding an extra layer of "This guy was clearly a bad actor"

Agreed. I 100% understand the rationale, but it has troubling implications. It only takes the one bad guy, but there are 25 other guys driving that night who would either be friendly or happily ignore you the whole ride.

I'd be interested in reading a breakdown of riders and drivers by gender in some representative areas. What I see this doing is, first yes, giving women and non-binary people an increased sense of safety (which I want to stress is still extremely important). But what I also see is an overall decline in service quality for women and non-binary people. Anecdote, not data, but I've used Lyft hundreds of times over the years in different cities. I've been picked up by maybe 3 people who weren't [presumably, I didn't ask] male identifying. On top of this, there is the possibility of certain genders earning more purely on the basis of gender. Remember - this is a bad thing for gender equality.

Something that might be better is an opt-in program with enhanced background checks, mandatory cab cameras designed to be difficult for your average person to fuck with some system for mandatory upload/secure storage of the footage, and other stuff along these lines. Do all these, regardless of gender, and you get a Secure Ride badge. The difficulty is the process and the knowledge you are under MUCH closer scrutiny. The prize is (potentially) access to a bigger piece of that that day's possible revenue.

I don't think the above is perfect, but they're steps towards a better system not based on gender lines among contractors.

Now, if they were treated like honest to god employees, this kind of thing might be easier to implement. Food for thought, Lyft.

Edit: Another thing that I think would be useful in general is a safety rating system on top of the other metrics. Have users provide anonymized data visible on the driver's profile about how safe they felt their ride was in general. Though admittedly I can see ways this could be abused or made un-useful. But I've personally been in situations where I did NOT feel safe, and would have rated them poorly in this area - but otherwise they got me home in one piece, and the reason I felt they were unsafe was they busted their ass all day and were almost nodding off.

In this situation, knowing how ratings play into Lyft and thinking about causes, my rating did not accurately reflect my actual sense of safety. An anonymous safety rating option, with comment, would have been appreciated.

https://bojackhorseman.fandom.com/wiki/Cabracadabra

Been a while since I watched it - remind me how Cabracadabra failed?

Maybe it's about men preferring female drivers and making it harder for other to get them. Woman may request a female driver to feel safer but men provably don't do it so much for that reason.

Since your comment will just look like one link for most people, here is an actual readable list:

• https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/rapist-doncaster-taxi-driver-jailed-for-string-of-sex-attacks-on-disabled-women-4110673
• https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2022-01-08/disgraceful-taxi-driver-rapist-jailed-for-15-years
• https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/cabbies-helped-snare-taxi-rapist-25371415
• https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/rapist-rotherham-taxi-driver-ordered-26575655
• https://www.beds.police.uk/news/bedfordshire/news/2021/december/taxi-driver-jailed-for-1993-rape-after-dna-match-decades-on/
• https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/croydon-taxi-rapist-homayon-ahmadi-b979493.html
• https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2023-06-15/taxi-driver-asked-to-use-customers-toilet-before-raping-her
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Worboys
• https://news.stv.tv/north/taxi-driver-saifal-zaveri-who-raped-and-sexually-assaulted-teens-in-private-hire-handed-jail-term
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1e73ddnw12o
• https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12423375/Rapist-taxi-drivers-warning-issued-British-tourists-Mediterranean-holiday-hotspot-woman-23-says-a
• https://pembrokeshire-herald.com/64975/ten-years-in-prison-for-milford-haven-taxi-driver-who-raped-passenger/

And I could do the same for any given race.

It might have something to do with women being at a higher risk of being abused. But unless you've been living under a rock you already knew that. So what are you really asking?

Because women have to fear men more than men have to fear women.

(numbers pulled out of my ass, but...)

99% of men don't need it so won't use it. 99% of the remainder will use it to find a target to harass. Whoever is left might miss out on a great feature, but they're barely a rounding error.

Personally, I'd love a feature that let me pick a driver that would just shut up.

It’s discrimination when a man does it

/s

I'm a little curious how they stop it.

What do men have to fear?

because someone else being non-binary doesn't make you non-binary?

they're not saying no one is allowed a gender, or that other people don't have genders

they're saying their gender is a different one beyond the usual two.

like how you don't have to just choose between vanilla or chocolate because strawberry also exists.

I doubt exclusion of men from this feature has anything to do with it being more work to add men. Hell, it's actually LESS work to enable it for everyone than it is to add exclusions. Excluding men was a business decision, I'm sure.

Now, I'm in the privileged position of being male, so take this with a grain of salt, but I entirely disagree with the blatant sexism of this feature. I get the purpose, but it feels horribly misguided. Can women not commit violent or sexual crimes? Can nonbinary people not commit violent or sexual crimes? Only men can apparently commit these crimes, according to the people who thought this feature up. Sexual crimes by women, for example, go wildly underreported..Even if they were using statistics to justify how they implemented this feature, they didn't do their homework.

It's probably due to the saturation of how many male drivers Lyft has. It reports that only 23% are female. While it doesn't say how many non-binary drivers there are, I doubt they make up more than a few percent. That puts men at ~75% driver share. So the chance of a a female rider, which according to Lyft are about half of their riders, being paired with is vastly smaller than a male rider getting a man.

0.5*0.75=0.375 chance for a man to get a male driver.

0.5*0.23=0.115 chance for a women to get a female driver.

While yes, you can abuse the system, you have to make a more conscious effort about being a "slimeball". This isn't necessarily a feature to prevent SH and SA, but more to make drivers and riders more comfortable.

Oh, and about the amount of code: it would be less code, as you do not need to filter and can just start a match-search.

Last time I used Uber I remember seeing this feature as an option.

?

.... what exactly is your point here?

As a man, it's honestly quite embarrassing some of these comments. My gf is tiny and one of my best friends is also a tiny woman. They endure so much shit on a daily basis without even discussing how imposing men can be in an enclosed area like a cab. I wonder how many of them in here whining are creepers themselves

I'm a man, and even I find many men to be uncomfortable to be around with how they talk about women, gays and trans people. Other men are the primary reason why I often feel ashamed to be male.

I'll keep letting women decide who they're comfortable to be around

That's kind of a red herring from "a corporation providing systemic discrimination"

"I'll keep letting women decide who they're comfortable to be around."

Show me one comment in this thread that contradicts this statement. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Thats right, you can't. Because no one here is actually saying the thing you're accusing them of saying. You've done nothing but build your own strawman and tear it right back down. Congratulations, I guess?

No one is getting played. What you said is completely besides the point and has nothing to do with the post. Even if correct.