When women riders and drivers told us they wanted more control over how they ride and earn, we listened. That feedback led to Women Preferences, features designed to give women the choice to ride with other women. Since our first pilots last summer, we’ve heard just how much that choice matters—from feeling more comfortable in the back seat to more confident behind the wheel.
Probably gonna get flak for this, but as a man, I have no issues if women want to stick with other women and I don’t particularly care if I have the option to pick whatever driver I want.
Obviously weirdness and sexual misconduct can occur to both men and women from both men and women, but it’s disingenuous as hell to pretend that men being weird or sexual towards women isn’t the most common by a colossal margin.
No flak. I was gonna post the same thing. Women deserve to feel safe too.
Two people literally disagree with you that women should feel safe.
This is why these options are now available to women.
I understand why women feel this is necessary, but I also understands that a policy like this paints all men with the same brush. It’s like they are saying “Since a small number of men are creeps, we give you the option to avoid all men”. Which seems to be counterproductive.
Meanwhile, Uber has invasive tracking, where they know everyone’s history. They know how many drives a customer has provisioned without incident. And I have always considered these rideshare things to be particularly safe, because all parties are consenting to the tracking. That’s not guarantee nothing will happen, of course, but it is more unlikely when all parties know Big Uber is watching you.
If Uber had rolled this out and said “you have the option to avoid rides with the opposite gender without an established history in our files”, then I think I would have less of a problem with it. But it seems like I can do everything right, and be respectful of everyone, and give Uber shitloads of money, and still be potentially waiting longer for a ride, just because of my parts. How is that OK?
It’s not about you. Repeat after me: It’s not about you. It’s about women who feel unsafe.
Most sexual assault is not reported.
And you will not be waiting longer, women who choose this service will be. So cut the pity party. You lose absolutely nothing.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think this is a genuine discrimination case. If Uber had rolled this out and said “White drivers can choose to pick up only white passengers”, would that be OK? Or even “Male drivers can choose to only pick up male passengers”?
Heck, I even think if they rolled this out and said “female users can choose a preference for only female drivers”, that might be able to fly, because it’s the buyer of the service expressing that view.
But to me, for the people offering the service, there is no difference between this and someone who doesn’t want to make a cake for a gay wedding. When you are offering a service to the general public, you can’t really discriminate like that. Yes, I understand the safety thing. But a store that catered to women wouldn’t be able to bar men from entering at all. Why is a car service any different? Yes, drivers are using their own cars, but it is still a car service.
You know what sucks the most about this? They’re probably gonna get sued over it, either by the Trump DOJ or some shitty Red State AG, who is probably gonna win.
An estimated 20% of women will be sexually assaulted in their life. Half of those will happen by the time that they’re 16. 40% of trans women will be sexually assaulted.
This isn’t about your feelings being hurt.
Large numbers of men are creeps, and I say that as a man. That’s the issue, that’s why they’re doing this.
Is there a technical definition of “large” that justifies this? If not, then this is all based on feelings.
I think it’s bad news to generalize entire large groups like this, no matter how good the intentions are.
Well yeah it’s based on feelings and it definitely just mindlessly repeating the extremely popular male bashing perspective the majority of fediverse users blindly accept as dogma, but it’s also undeniably true. A very large number of us are creeps. If you’d like to get technical, we can pull sexual crimes stats of men vs women and see which number is larger… But, do we really have to?
And it’s not that we’re inherently evil or perverse by nature. It’s that, more often than not, in one on one interactions we are the ones with the potential ability to physically dominate and coerce the human of the other sex. Every once in a while a man will delude himself, snap, explode or give in to whatever dark urge was brooding in him and use that ability in some horrible way.
The probability of an individual of whatever demographic doing something horrible is = (the probability they have the urge to attempt the horrible thing) x (the probability they have the capacity to carry out the horrible thing). It’s really not that complicated.
And If you think women would never do this if they had, on average, larger body frames, more strength and were brainwashed into seeking validation through dominance from an early age, please allow me to introduce you to the fascinating matriarchal pack dynamics of the spotted hyena, where females are larger and stronger than males. Guess which sex is more aggressive and socially dominant?
It’s not that us men are evil. It’s that on average, we have physical power that more often than not, woman do not. Any form of power has the potential to corrupt, cause it can be used for evil and therefore, every once in a while, given a large enough time frame or population, it will.
I don’t necessarily even disagree with this feature but I can’t help but imagine the outrage if that was almost literally any other group of people.
I can’t help but I imagine JK Rowling tweeting some day about how she used this feature and was appalled to be driven by a trans-woman.
A lot of white people are afraid of black people. Should we let people choose their driver by the color of their skin? Their ethnicity? The language they speak? Their sexual orientation? Their religion?
Discrimination is bad for everyone else, but somehow for men we just say “eh they have it coming”.
As a man, this makes me sad. As a man, I also understand.
So does this mean there is going to gender verification to go along with age verification?
Seems like something that would happen in this timeline.
No because the presumption is that you will provide ID to your employer and they will go by whatever is on the ID when assigning rides.
What employer? Uber drivers are independent contractors.
I’m dubious
It’s things like this that make me, as a man, to prefer male servers/drivers.
If women chose other women, that’s fine but I do feel bad about the men getting less work, so I think it’s only fair to balance the demand gap by allowing men to chose male servers/drivers.
That behaviour would probably have the opposite effect that the people who created this rule would want.
they are choosing women drivers for their safety, you are throwing a tantrum because women wanting to feel safe in the face of a systemic and well documented issue has hurt your feelings.
A small percentage of women will ever face any sort of harassment from male drivers.
At the same time, all male drivers will be affected by this feature, reducing their life-supporting income through no fault of their own, simply because they have “male” in their documents. I think that’s the point.
A small percentage of women will ever face any sort of harassment from male drivers.
Ask any women in your life, it is not a small percentage. And you dismissing their safety concerns and prioritizing your comfort is the exact reason why this is necessary.
If all men would look at this and say “Sucks that this is needed, but way too many men are genuinely dangerous and we should actively purge them from our institutions so in the future solutions like this won’t be needed” then we would not have a problem in the first place. It is people like you that makes half the population afraid and anxious about the other half.
give men the option to ride with men as well, and nobody will have an issue with this
Many women want to ride with other women for safety reasons. Men would only choose their riders gender for bigotry reasons. There is little reason to enable their bigotry. If fewer bigots ride it’s a bug not a feature.
and this right here is why I cant stand a lot of other liberals. you guys make me ashamed to be one… smh
How hard is this to understand. Women frequently feel unsafe with strange men in uncontrolled situations like alone in a car because men who are commonly bigger and stronger commonly beat and rape women. Men who are on average bigger and stronger are very rarely assaulted or raped by strange women because women are both less physically imposing and are less prone to violence and most specifically sexual violence. Whereas its not impossible or unheard for a woman to be so this is so uncommon it is rarely something people are reasonably concerned about either factually or culturally.
Did I really need to tell you any of that or did you in fact already know that. The whiners here do NOT want men to be equal and have the ability to chose men drivers they want women not to have a path to discriminate against them because THEY believe they aren’t the problem. Hell the guys who ARE the problem are also sure they aren’t the problem.
nothing about this is hard to understand, I just don’t want to perpetuate hate and inequality, or create division. letting both sexes choose their own sex if they want to wouldn’t leave anyone feeling slighted. its a simple solution that wouldn’t leave anyone room to complain.
Why do we care if anyone has room to complain?
Citation needed. Back up those claims cuz that’s sounding like pure emotional projection.
You need a citation for many women being unsafe with random men in a car but the reverse not being true. OK buddy.
Hold on a second. Did you honestly think you were coming across as unemotional when you said that?
Keep your emotions out of it, I learned to manage that, takes a lot of work but it’s a good skill to have.
Tell me what facts you think you know that makes you claim 100% of men who would use that feature would be doing it for bigotry reasons.
You don’t even need to do citations, I’ll go do the research for us.
The only thing I humbly beg you to tell me is what fact you know that I don’t, I’m not seeing the missing puzzle piece.
If you know something I’m missing I genuinely want to know, cuz I’m not afraid of changing my mind when proven wrong. I just genuinely think you’re just making some unfair assumptions that’s all. There’s no shame in it, most people do it. But it might surprise you to learn that a lot of people would rather die than be wrong about something.
Don’t get mad at me. TALK to me.
i have only ever been sexually harassed by male uber drivers. this is a nice feature
So what happens when the rider can’t find a ride because 99% of drivers are men and it’s the middle of the night? We never ask the hard questions, do we? Should sex discrimination in employment be legal? I’ve always felt bad for male masseuses, nurses and childcare providers having to deal with additional scrutiny and having money taken out of their pocket not because of merit but because of gender.
Lyft has been doing it for a while and it seems to work out.
This also boosts demand for women drivers
You can’t make women want to drive. I get why they wouldn’t want to. Lots of creeps.
Awesome, but they should also give men the option to choose to ride with a man.
There’s already an app that does that.
It’s called grindr.
Maybe Uber should be responsible for background checks of their drivers and hold them accountable for their actions and be able to fire them for misconduct. But that might require hiring drivers as actual employees. And then Uber could issue company vehicles.
Oh wait, I’m describing taxi companies that already existed before Uber.
The fact that we allow Uber/Lyft to operate as a way to skirt regulations that were put in place to keep people safe, and then trust Uber will implement work around solutions like this is ridiculous.
Same goes to AirBnB
While I agree with this, and I’m not defending skirting regulations, before rideshare apps, taking taxis was an awful experience. At least half the time, if you try to pay with a credit card, the machine was “broken”, if you wanted to get a ride at a specific time you had to call ahead and hope that a taxi would show up.
Rideshsre apps forced regular taxis to up their game and provide better service, some did and now have their own apps.
I don’t even know what regulations they are skirting. You can’t just sign up to become a driver without submitting information just like any other job. Background checks are required, licenses and what not. People are also supposed to leave feedback if they had a bad experience so I could only imagine that the complaints are surrounding the idea that Uber isn’t following up on the feedback enough. That said if 500 people ride with that driver and rate them well, and 1 person says they were a perv, and Uber looks at it and finds that person has called several male drivers pervs while they get good ratings from everyone else, there could be a problem that those people have a type, or Uber could be thinking the issue is the rider at that point
Worker regulations mostly. Since drivers aren’t employees, they get no benefits whatsoever.
can males avoid women drivers or is that considered sexist? what if a male wants to mitigate the chance of being falsely accused of assault/rape? I hope people have the choice regardless of gender
edit: the downvotes are funny… I assume people think I mean women should not have the choice, but I mean the opposite. EVERYONE should have a choice, or no one. it’s call being fair. rape/sexual assault is not a good scenario for anyone and if people are fearful, they should be allowed to make a choice that allows them to feel comfortable. the downvotes just show me that people are disrespectful/not caring when it comes to fairness and equality. l… or they are just flat out sexist pricks.
It might be considered sexist, depending on who you ask.
The amount of males being falsely accused of sexual assault is much lower than the amount of females being exposed to sexual assault. Hence why there has been provided a measure for women at this scale, and not for men.
The amount of males being falsely accused of sexual assault is much lower than the amount of females being exposed to sexual assault.
And you know this because… vibes?
Male drivers probably want that too. Especially the drunk women.
There was an exposé about the staggering number of sexual assaults last year by the new york times. Some people were drawn to this job for the wrong reasons. You read some of these women’s stories and its horrifying.
I’m dowdy and older and even I have had some questionable interactions. Once an uberdriver invited himself to to bar I was meeting my friends at. Half an hour after dropping me off, he walks in and gets a drink and just stares. I don’t drink because of medication but this was definitely a niche place that you don’t grab a drink at spur of the moment. It was so uncomfortable and we left pretty quickly. Idk what his intentions were but I didn’t want to find out. It was so unsettling.
Sometimes getting a ride is necessary. And when that happens, maybe it’s better that there are options. I’m sure Uber didn’t make this decision out of the goodness of their hearts but because of the lawsuits and the number of women who were dropping off of their platform.
A lot of the responses here seem to be taking it personally as if they are being called assaulters themselves. Some people are even making jokes like good riddance. It’s rude af and belittling. Not everything is black and white and not everything can be understood from a perspective of privilege. It might not feel like it, but women navigate the world looking over their shoulder and not having that feeling in of itself is a privilege
Highlights of the article: https://youtube.com/shorts/5nwnr_aln9o
So what’s the point? Its a win-win drivers and passengers both right? Because the male drivers also face problems like threat of a false accusation, vomit in the car, cancelling ride in-between and not getting paid or being robbed.
A friend of mine used drive a cab for a company that took night shift employees from workplace to their homes. He was allowed to use that cab as a taxi in off time, so he did that to make some extra money. A hardworking man with a good character. He got a ride from a nightclub to some hotel or some place (I don’t recall that). He does not drive anymore, he left that job and has started some other work. Not all men are bad, and not all women are good.
The passenger was so drunk that she couldn’t even get into the car by herself. So he helped her into the backseat and then he started driving. She cancelled the ride mid-way and when he asked her to get off, she attacked him from backseat and threatened him with a false accusation. To his good luck, the guy had a two-way recording dashcam in the car, that he used to save himself.
I think it’s just not having people in your life telling you how bad it is. I have a friend who changed her name on Facebook to avoid stalkers, something I wouldn’t have even thought of at all. It still feels bad when I feel like she (subconsciously) feels scared being around me though, I don’t want to make people afraid by just existing.
I get it, but it’s discrimination and someone is going to sue them for it.
“I’m entitled to make women who are victims of sexual assault remarkably uncomfortable and fearing for their safety! I demand compensation!”
“I only want white drivers” - some racist.
It’s the same fucking thing.
In this case the effect is so serious that you don’t really have a good option. It would be like if specifically Asian people were joining Uber trying to sexually assault men, I would probably do something to allow men to avoid Asians. It’s absolutely racist but at least I’m massively reducing the sexual assaults. The reason this doesn’t apply to race as much is almost every time something was blamed on race it was just a lie or completely misrepresented.
unless you’ve actually literally lived as a woman you cannot know the monumental amount of sexual harassment we face and fear on a day-to-day basis. doubly so for trans women. every single moment i am alone in public i am deathly anxious that i could be harassed (sexually or otherwise) or hate-crimed or whatever. and the worst part is, there’s nothing i could do about it. the perpetrator would get away scot-free. the cops do not fucking care
however bad you think it is, it’s worse. whatever you’re imagining, it is exponentially more horrendous
This is the thing as a former white man.
Authority to touch others flows down the privilege hierarchy.
Trans women are always judged as the aggressor, always. Our bodies are considered public property.
Alhamdulillah, the women are imposing Sharia upon themselves.
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