So what I dislike about this is that the driver is the one choosing. If the customer was placing their preference, and then Lyft agrees to attempt to place them with their preference (for a surcharge of course, priority service shouldn’t be free) that would be something I could get behind. Letting drivers flat refuse service to someone based solely on their gender sounds like opening the doors to discrimination suits.
Conceptually, sure. But I imagine it’d be a potential lawsuit over workplace discrimination. Especially if the female drivers are being paid more for the same service.
Male drivers get your discrimination lawsuits ready for your lost income.
Did you even read the article? How would women drivers deciding they want more women and nb passengers cause male drivers to lose income…
How is this the most upvoted comment
Your comment makes no sense given the details provided in the article. The toggle runs a gender-based sort on available passengers when a driver indicates they’re ready to pick up a new passenger.
- Male driver, without this toggle, indicates they’re ready for a passenger? All waiting passengers are sorted by current algorithms.
- Female+ driver, with this toggle off, indicates they’re ready for a passenger? All waiting passengers are sorted by current algorithms.
- Female+ driver, with this toggle on, indicates they’re ready for a passenger? All waiting passengers are sorted by gender then current algorithms.
At no point does the pool of available passengers for male drivers decrease.
You’ve changed the perspective to potential wait time for male passengers. That may be true but it doesn’t have an adverse impact on male drivers, which is what was stated in the comment I replied to.
It is objectively always better to be in the women+ group than outside of it.
Based on Ubers data, women+ are raped five times as often in ride shares. “Objectively” I bet a lot of women+ would choose “maybe a longer wait” over “5x chance of being raped”.
This idea of feeling safe is causing us to regress as a society. This “feature” is just discrimination wrapped in a nice sounding name — “Women Plus Connect” and UI.
We used to be able to identify the predators in our communities and do some sort of action: jail them, shame them, beat them up, whatever. Now we are using fear of them to perpetuate discrimination and AVOID them.
We were historically terrible at identifying predators and mostly let them alone to victimize or if their victims were less important destroyed victims lives as a matter of course leading to wide scale silence by victims.
We have less crime by far and prosecute more scumbags than we did 50 years ago.
Communities “handling” bad folks by individual violence never worked worth a shit because communities have always cared about whose more important than who is right and it doesn’t meaningfully scale which is why it never worked worth a shit it real life.
In order to deal with shit heads you have to have a dispassionate authority whose job it is to prosecute shit heads who isn’t politically bound to give a shit about your penny ante local bullshit and the expectation that local yokels will properly do their job and push shit up the food chain or be held accountable.
A dispassionate authority is more effective at protecting local communities from predators, but at what price? Unfortunately that dispassionate authority also has little compassion for the poor and marginalized people it rules and even less accountability to them. I’m also more afraid of the Orwellian police state being proliferated by the marriage of federal law enforcement and multinational corporations than criminals in my neighborhood. Those people breaking the law in my neighborhood probably need better access to mental healthcare instead of long sentences in federal prisons handed down by said dispassionate authority.
Our justice system is a POS but fixing it is the only reasonable path forward. Community “justice” is how we got lynchings. It was and would continue to be a horror.
The actual numbers speak for themselves and the clear motivation for this feature.
About 91% of the victims of rape were riders and about 7% of the victims were drivers. Women made up 81% of the victims while men comprised about 15%
Uber releases safety data: 998 sexual assault incidents including 141 rape reports in 2020
Women Plus were 85% of the victims. This is despite the “ways” Uber has implemented to increase safety.
Since users choose their gender in the app, this has some potential to be used for more nefarious purposes, no?
Not a big fan of discriminatory options like this, btw.
Wouldn’t need it at all if rideshare drivers stopped sexually assaulting passengers
There are plenty of sexually aggressive riders too. It’s not one sided. We can summarize it thus: people suck.
Perhaps this whole “random people using their regular car to give rides to total strangers” thing was a bad idea…
What if instead the rides were given in specially modified cars that can include some security features for both parties? And in order to pay for this, perhaps there could be some kind of central company that owned the cars and simply hired the drivers?
Can’t really comment on that as in my city (not US) to drive for these companies you need a license. To get the license, they perform background checks, check your criminal record, ask for medical approval, etc, every time you have to renew it, and all this seems to stop a lot of bad stuff. Not saying it doesn’t happen - you can’t never completely stop it - but there are ways to reduce it.
Anyway, they could just allow customers to select their preferred gender, would make anyone that wants to use such option happy, and we wouldn’t even have to talk about discrimination.
I’d assume if you get legal action thrown at you though, it’d be a lot harder to deny if you also were picking a gender to get specific drivers.
Legal action for picking the “wrong” option in an app? Also, “I’m gender fluid, your honor”, so good luck proving anything.
By “nefarious purposes” I meant serious stuff. Some deranged fuck decides to kill (edit: a certain gender) and there’s not much you can do after they point a gun or put a knife to the driver’s neck. It’s too late by then.
I don’t know, I understand their intention, but it seems to have some flaws.
Explain how sorting the list of available passengers by gender is discrimination? It’s being rolled out in huge metropolitan markets so there will be enough drivers for everyone to get one.
@flumph if they allowed sorting the list by race, instead of by gender… would you understand how it’s discrimination, then?
The protected category doesn’t matter, I don’t see how anyone is getting a leg up or being held back by the feature.
The option allows customers to prioritize drivers from two of their 3 gender groups: “female” and “non-binary”. One group is left out and if you happen to be in that group, you’ll end up doing less trips, making less money.
I wouldn’t be happy with a setting to prioritize “male”, so you can see why I’m not happy with a setting that prioritizes “female” and “non-binary”. You either give the customer the option to prioritize any gender or you don’t.
Since they can’t verify one’s gender, the potential for abuse is there. A customer could prioritise these groups if they wanted to target them and the driver could also pick one of these genders if they wanted to have people of said gender in their car.
So as a driver I have now a filter for better rape and murder victims? Nice!
I assume they’ll probably check with the gender people put on their drivers licenses or something.
Yes, they can in. Non binary licenses are available in all 3 states that they’re piloting in. CA, AZ, and Il all have them.
On the rider side, women and nonbinary riders will see an option to “count me in” in their Lyft app. Choosing this will “increase their chances of matching with women and nonbinary drivers,” according to this blog post from Lyft.
For drivers, the feature is based on the gender marker on their license on file, and for riders, on their gender setting within the app, explained CJ Macklin, senior communications manager at Lyft, in an email to The Verge. “Both riders and drivers will have the option to update their gender settings at any time to ensure it is reflective of their personal gender identity,” said Macklin.
It’s opt-in on both sides.
