Lyft is introducing a new feature that lets women and non-binary riders choose a preference to match with drivers of the same gender.
The ride-hailing company said it was a “highly requested feature” in a blog post Tuesday, saying the new feature allows women and non-binary people to “feel that much more confident” in using Lyft and also hopefully encourage more women to sign up to be drivers to access its “flexible earning opportunities.”
The service, called “Women+ Connect,” is rolling out in the coming months. Riders can turn on the option in the Lyft app, however the company warns that it’s not a guarantee that they’ll be matched with a women or non-binary person if one of those people aren’t nearby. Both the riders and drivers will need to opt-in to the feature for it work and riders must chose a gender for it to work.
That’s really bullshit. This result will be that every male drivers will become non binary to not be discriminated by the customers.
This is not because some suffer that it is correct to punish an entire gender for that.
This feature also has the potential of endangering those drivers. If I were a driver I’d definitely not opt in to a function like this.
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.
Hey could you take me to this super secluded location I need to go to? I’m just gonna hop in the back behind the drivers seat thx
Wasn’t this a plotline in Bojack Horseman?
If a system is bad for women we blame the the system, if a system is bad for men we blame the men.
?
… what exactly is your point here?
What’s next? The “no blacks” option? I’m sure you can find studies to validate that fear too.
That’s a neat feature; I wonder why it’s explicitly not available to men (who would prefer a male driver for whatever reason)… I guess maybe they feel that would go against the stated goal of encouraging more women to sign up as drivers, but like… why? If nothing else, men with a preference for male drivers would ensure that more women / non-binary folks could get drivers matching their gender, since as they note there’s far more non-male riders than drivers.
I also wonder if it gives non-male drivers the option to only accept riders who match their gender, which it seems would be the more important facet to encouraging non-male drivers, if safety concerns are the reason they’re not signing up to do so.
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.
It specifically says it lets riders request a driver matching their own gender, not any gender you want.
don’t I choose my gender?
If you’re non-binary, or not male, then you fall under this policy anyway; it only doesn’t apply to male-identifying males.
Really? Seems like a bit of a stretch.
Never heard any of my male friends ever comment on the sex of a driver or even have a preference.
I mean all my evidence on this is anecdotal, and yours seems like it’s just conjecture.
Edit: How do men not caring about the gender of their driver reduce the amount of woman drivers for the women who ask for them?
If men and “not men” can ask for woman drivers they are “competing” for some drivers and making it harder for each other to get them. If only “not men” can ask for women it is easier for them to get the driver they want. So if men don’t have a strong preference it’s easier for other to get what they are asking for.
I’m not agreeing with them, just trying to make sense of it.
So this feature is matching with someone of the same gender only. That’s the impression this gives. So women with women, nonbinary to nonbinary. Ok. Why are men cut off if that’s the case? How many more lines of code could it possibly be to just implement it for everyone instead of specifically choosing to exclude people? It would be the exact same PR if it was made available to everyone. There’s zero reason this couldn’t just be implemented universally. In terms of this making things safer or more comfortable, couldn’t someone that is a slimeball just lie? The article says you have to choose your gender. What is actually stopping someone from misusing this?
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.
You’re missing the point. Obviously anyone is capable of commiting these crimes, but men overwhelmingly commit them to women than any other circumstance, and they’re almost always much more violent than the inverse. Shit, my friend showed me a TikTok the other day about a woman who rejected a man, then slapped him when he wouldn’t take no for an answer. You know what he did in response? He hit her in the head with a fucking brick.
Instead of instantly going to “this is sexist”, maybe stop and think why it’s even being considered in the first place.
ITT: Men who don’t understand the dangers of living as a woman.
I’m a passing trans woman. I presented as a man for decades of my life and have lived the last handful as a woman. But the amount of times I’ve been groped, harassed, chased or made to feel worried about my physical safety just for existing in the world has skyrocketed. Truly, I know what it’s like to experience society both ways and without question it is worse for women.
I’ve had men sit next to me at the theater, put their hand on my knee and try to feel me up. Ive had men smirk as they “accidently” bump in to me at the grocery to squeeze my breasts. I’ve been followed to my car by men asking what I was doing tonight, who then started yelling and only left because I had pepper spray.
Like, srsly. Every single one of you saying this is discrimination have no clue what it’s like to worry that any interaction with a man you don’t know can quickly turn scary. Getting in to some random guys lyft who will then know where I live, while he has the ability to lock the doors is honestly a super vulnerable position to put yourself in situation.
Yes, mens wages will be harmed, but women are physically being harmed right now. Tell lyft to pay their drivers an hourly wage like they should anyways and STFU about a safety feature.
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.
I’m not sure how blatantly enabling sex discrimination is going to help things here.
Well, then you are just being willfully ignorant because I already typed out why getting in to a cab is scary. Features like this are going to help women choose what type of situation they are putting themselves in. Say whatever you like about women being to use a gun/knife too, but assault and sexual assaults happen, the average man is stronger than the average woman and being in a confined space with a stranger is putting yourself at risk. Women are at a greater risk then men, so should have greater control how they handle those interactions.
Then Lyft should focus on driver quality rather than enabling blatantly illegal sex discrimination.
You would think someone who has surely faced so much discrimination would be less of a bigot.
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’m a bisexual non binary black person. I do understand the anxiety discriminated groups face, but that’s not an excuse to discriminate even more. We should look at the root causes of the violence and solve those rather than just discriminate even more and just let the issue get worse.
I mean I agree we should look into the root causes. But practically that is a long-term, society-wide project. We don’t even know what the root causes are, let alone how to address them. And moreover that project is not one a ride-share company can address.
So we sometimes have to take less-than-ideal, but more practical measures to address the current situation, right?
Locking this discussion because you guys just can’t keep it civil. These comments (and the many that had to be removed) just prove the point of the article.
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/
Most bigots think they have what are “really good” reasons for their bigotry
Lawsuit when
Oh boy, can’t wait until they do that for race.
What an idiotic idea.
Removed by mod
That’s fucking sexist hate speech. Any time you’re gonna say something about a group of people, just change the group name to “jews” and see how it sounds. If it sounds wrong when you say that sentence about jews, then it’s wrong when you say that sentence about anyone.
We all know jews are the problem. We all know society’s allowance of jew’s behavior is the problem.
That sounds like a nice platitude until you think about it for more than two seconds.
We all know Nazis are the problem. We all know society’s allowance of Nazs’ behavior is the problem.
I don’t think many will find this that objectionable.
Now, you’ll probably point out that there’s a difference between (mostly) immutable characteristics and political behavior, and I’d agree with that. Political violence is inherently problematic, while sheer the act of being a man is not.
However, while a bit over broadly phrased, the act of being a man isn’t really what’s being criticized. It’s harassment, violence, and apathetic tolerance of these by men that’s the actual core problem. There is absolutely a valid discussion that can be had about how appropriate or rational it is to conflate every individual man with the group as a whole, but particularly when it comes to matters of personal safety, rationality goes out the window and emotions rule the day. A woman can know that any individual man is unlikely to misbehave, but when she’s experienced an extensive amount of harassment - and essentially all women have - there’s going to be a negative association there simply from human nature.
So again, whether or not a policy like this is an appropriate response (or even legal) to the problem of women feeling threatened by men is something that can be discussed. But I think the far more important conversation to have is why women even feel threatened by men in the first place, and that, like it or not, is because of men’s behavior as a group. The way for that to change is for those problematic men, who are of course generally a minority, to cut their shit and for them to not be tolerated by other men. Otherwise, the fundamental problem will still be there, and the best we’ll ever be able to muster is a series of messy and unfair band-aids.
