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
Next they should add white people to be able to get only white drivers to make them comfortable! /s It’s obviously sexist and not a real solution to their issues
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.
At no point does the pool of available passengers for male drivers decrease.
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.
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.
That’s half of the story the breakdown of drivers and riders would make it look even worse (i am assuming most drivers are actually male)
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.
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
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.
They'd need a toggle for the feature on the rider side as well. Like "hide my gender"
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 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.
The option allows customers to prioritize drivers...
Nope, it doesn't. The feature is for drivers, not passengers.
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.
Are they checking the customers too? If not, it seems to be an easy way for some weirdos to go around targetting genders they don't like.
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.
Step 0: Be the sort of scum that would assault a lyft driver
Step 1: Set your identity to non binary as a rider
Step 2: Dress in a way to appear non-binary, even a little bit. Honestly just painting your nails purple and wearing thick glasses is probably enough to not raise suspicion. Most people wont try and question this and interrogate you over it. If they do, filter them off and be a normal rider.
Step 3: If they don't question it, congrats, Lyft has no just done the work of assisting you with finding your next victim, great job Lyft!
Bonus round~!
So people who haven't been doing that already are going to suddenly go out of their way using steps that will show obvious intent during future prosecution?
"Already" It's a new feature, so no one is doing it already.
They haven't been abusing drivers already.
Yes, targeting could conceivably make it easier but it was already possible.
targeting could conceivably make it easier but it was already possible.
I agree...
You understand this is the entire point of what I wrote though, right? That in an effort to try and make lyft safer, they have effectively done the exact opposite and literally made it easier for abusers to target victims.
Wow good way to make the women feel incredibly unsafe and easily targeted.
I look forward to seeing the same people suing over bathroom access doing the mental gymnastics to sue over this.
Wasn't there a BoJack horseman episode almost exactly like this lmao
Yeah, this will end up just as well I'm assuming
John Wayne Gacy is really unhappy with this feature.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Choosing this will “increase their chances of matching with women and nonbinary drivers,” according to this blog post from Lyft.
If someone goes through the steps to change their gender in the app, we are going to assume that is how they identify,” Audrey Liu, Executive Vice President/Head of Design at Lyft, said in a statement.
“Inclusivity is a core value at Lyft and we are committed to creating a community in which riders and drivers feel as though they are included and belong.”
Lyft says this feature has been highly requested and will give women and nonbinary people more control over both the driving and riding experience.
Currently, that demographic accounts for less than a quarter of Lyft drivers, which is comparable with the rest of the rideshare industry, according to a report by Gridwise.
Those in launch cities can download the latest version of the Lyft app starting tomorrow, Sept. 13th to access the feature.
The original article contains 478 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
