Great news for all the would-be predator Lyft drivers out there!
Discrimination is never a good thing. Separate but “equal” is never a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, this thread is a bunch of people spouting an updated version of the “men in women’s bathrooms is gonna lead to rape” bullshit.
