I hope Uber drivers have in interior camera running in their cars, for their own protection.
Trust in strangers has never been easy in the US. If something is to change, it has to start individually.
you read what you wanted to read, instead of what was actually written
We're talking about less than 100 cases per year. The real thing to be worried about is a false conviction for drugs or DUI. That happens way more often.
That isn't to say you should not be thinking about making sure you don't put yourself in a situation where you could be falsely accused of something. I would say, if you are thinking in that way - spending some time making sure you don't do anything to make women uncomfortable is a good way to spend some of that energy as well - same goal, different thought process.
I have had countless discussions with americans about guns that go along the lines of "What happens if (insert extremely rare violent incident) happens?" and they all literally seem unable to comprehend that these are just not things I even think about at all, and they really shouldn't either given how extremely rare they all are.
But a huge percentage of the population does worry about being victimised constantly.
It is the main reason that despite the obvious financial benefits and my love for certain landscapes/areas of the US I've never had the slightest desire to move there.
Maybe the 24 hours news cycle is responsible for that, I don't know. It's pretty weird, though. And I say that as someone who has lived in unsafe neighborhoods in my native country.
This is called being a "Soft Touch."
One of you is afraid that YOU are going to get assaulted or worse.
The other is afraid you’re going to get ACCUSED of it.
What has this society become?
Can you pick Waymos? I was in Austin with my daughter who Ubers quite a bit (because dear God there's nowhere to park in that damned city) this weekend. She called an Uber and a Waymo showed up and she was grateful because she prefers them too, but she said that she's not aware of a way to specify that you just want a Waymo.
Of course she immediately hung up and cancelled the ride. I drove a few blocks in the opposite direction he wanted to go and threw him out of my car.
That's how he acted with me in the car. Can't imagine how he would have been alone with a female driver.
EDIT: How intellectual of you, HN.
This isn't being done because they want to, users have been asking for this since pretty early in ridesharing history. They're pre-empting the lawsuits and their consequences
Lyft already has such a feature, and personally I've been getting into Empower more, which also has the feature. This app pays more for drivers due to not actually acting as a taxi company but simply connecting the driver and rider marketplaces, something Uber tried to do as well but failed due to legal challenges as well as keeping margin for themselves. Empower just charged $50 per month to drivers as a subscription fee for the service and then lets them keep all the actual ride money.
However, just as with a marketplace connector like TripAdvisor or TaskRabbit, your mileage may vary (literally) in terms of driver ratings and safety, due to Empower not doing as comprehensive background checks as Uber or Lyft, so it is up to your personal risk tolerance.
Can someone explain to me how this is (or isn't) legal under Title VII?
It seems if this is fully legal because it's the customer making the decision, then pretty much any form of "in app" discrimination is legal as long as it's the customer doing the discrimination. How long till "I don't want a black/white/gay/etc driver" options show up?
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — George Orwell, Animal Farm
This kind of "discrimination" is a part of society, and has been tested in courts plenty of times.
Could you link to some cases where this kind of thing has been tested? I have an amateur interest in law and this issue is puzzling to me. It's not at all clear to me why it's okay to discriminate against Uber drivers based on the genitals they are born with, but not e.g. their skin color or religion.
Generally customer demand is not enough use this defense. Airlines tried using it to defend hiring only female flight attendants and lost.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...
https://onlabor.org/january-25-2026
I think the lawsuits probably make sense. While you can claim that there is a statistical danger, you can make that same claim about a number of other protected characteristics. Would we allow riders to request only female, heterosexual, over 45, wealthy Quaker drivers, if that happens to be the statistically safest driver characteristic?
- The inside of the car is surveilled and made available for both parties after the ride.
- The intent is made clear, that this is to capture a trace of any harassment or misconduct. Hopefully making this statement puts all parties on their best behaviour.
- Any failure to comply by the driver, camera blocked or audio muffled, then driver gets penalised.
What about women drivers?
How will the boundaries of these classifications be determined, and what happens when someone tests these boundaries?
The headline is…
“Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US”
What if somebody started a Whites-only gym because it made them feel safer?
If applying your logic on skin color leads to discrimination then maybe it's discrimination even when the discriminated party is males.
Have you seen any correlation between socioeconomic factors and perpetrators of sexual assaults?
Recognising that one group commits the majority of certain crimes isn't the issue, as you said it's just stats. The issue is entirely in ignoring other factors.
That said filtering out drivers of a certain race is unlikely to make any difference in your risk profile where women filtering out men is likely to make a huge difference in their risk profile.
Maybe some claim it's for safety but the fact they're often 24hr would decry that.
For anyone reading who has not previously considered it, please imagine what it feels like to be in a moving, locked vehicle you're not in control of, in an unfamiliar place, with someone who is much stronger and taller than you who's not respecting your verbal boundaries. What guarantee do you have it will stop there? What could happen if I truly upset him? How much more unpleasant could it become for me? Meanwhile, I'm paying for this. Even with the option, I'm still paying with the extra time I willingly choose to wait.
I guess we're moving full steam towards sharia-law-like segregation.
Hints: membership clubs, religious organizations (Gainz Я God)
Even if you go "fair" and have the same number of drains regardless of size you often end up with lines for the women.
Most large place compensate by putting in way too many toilets on average or just hope there isn't a crush-time.
The best place to see this in action is at a stadium with 50/50 fans during half-time or other break.
my workplace has a no perfume/cologne policy, and we have lawyers on staff, so itd be interesting to find out it is.
"No perfume" is pretty simple, but "no smelling like curry" would clearly be at or over the line.
Deep breath in... There are two types of discrimination. Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell, let's call them Type I and Type II.
Type II discrimination is the evil awful kind we rightfully rail against. It is "treating people negatively, based on arbitrary aversions or animosities to individuals of a particular race or sex..."
Type I discrimination is of the broader sort; "an ability to discern differences in the qualities of people and things, choosing accordingly." We run our lives with this kind of discrimination: is this food safe to eat? is this activity safe to participate in? do I trust this person given what I know about them?
>> Ideally, Discrimination I, applied to people, would mean judging each person as an individual, regardless of what group that person is part of. But here, as in other contexts, the ideal is seldom found among human beings in the real world, even among people who espouse that ideal. If you are walking at night down a lonely street, and see up ahead a shadowy figure in an alley, do you judge that person as an individual or do you cross the street and pass on the other side? The shadowy figure in the alley could turn out to be a kindly neighbor, out walking his dog. But, when making such decisions, a mistake on your part could be costly, up to and including costing you your life. [1]
This kind of discrimination is what we're talking about. I'd venture that not only is it OK, it is necessary. In this case, men that have had no background check, and whose form of employment is as an Uber driver are more likely to harass women (or do worse) than a female driver. Allowing women to make a selection based on this likelihood means that female customers that are alone can make choices to still use the service while reducing the overall risk.
Mitigation of this risk in normal taxi services take the form of background checks, bonds, and a chain of responsibility running from employer to employee to customer. It places more risk on the employer deliberately. Uber deliberately chooses to avoid this risk and responsibility. That choice is baked into their business model. That means enabling this kind of discrimination from their customers is a required feature of the service.
[1] Discrimination and Disparities, by Thomas Sowell
I'm failing to see how anything you say could be used as a guideline to pick between "good" discrimination and "bad" discrimination. The major distinction you draw between "Type II" and "Type I" is the fact that one is fueled by "arbitrary aversion" which is not a particularly useful distinction.
What if I denied entry to black people from my bar because ""they commit more crimes"" and ""are more likely to break stuff"", is it morally ok? Why not? My opinion is that no, it's not ok because the majority of people punished were never going to behave in an uncivil way.
The same logic can be easily applied to this situation. Are men more likely to behave sexually inappropriately (which ranges from verbal harassment to assault)? Sure. Is it the majority? Hell no, it's nowhere close.
(Of course it's worth nothing that the "majority" does not necessarily have 50.01%, it's just an arbitrary line you can draw as long as you are consistent about it)
The reality is that if Uber rapes are an issue, and something like this is not allowed, women will just stop using it entirely.
Or special Uberpods will be developed where the driver is completely encased and the passenger has a "auto drive to police station" button.
In the case of a woman coming into contact with some driver and volunteering location information like her home address, she has little to no information to make that judgement. Providing her just that bit of information, and allowing her to discriminate based on it, makes her safer. Ideally, she'd have way more information than just whether the driver is male or female. The reputation information helps, but isn't always reliable.
So the difference between "good" discrimination and "bad" discrimination is the amount of information on which the decision is based upon?
Logically then uber could add a "white only" option, "no queer" and "no leftist". (of course this is arbitrary but you can easily come up with a reason why: if you split any group of real people in two it's only natural that one group has an higher incidence of a negative trait)
This also has a second problem: what if we let the passenger know not only the sex but also if the driver ate fish in the morning (and hundreds of other useless facts)? Does that make it discrimination because they have far more information?
I guess not but then how do you decide what information is valuable in order to decide if there is enough information to judge the individual instead of going off statistics? How can you say that our theoretical racist patron is in fact racist and not going off the only valuable information?
That's a straw-man argument.
If an employer did the same thing, would you argue that's also not discriminatory? Or, to pick a notorious example, if a cake shop only agreed to sell to straight couples, would that be the same? If not, why not?
These platforms connect service providers and consumers. That should be obvious, I think.
A better challenge would be if these same platforms allowed racial selections. Which I think everyone would be uncomfortable with in a way “let women avoid men” does not evoke.
Probably because of motivation. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence of racially motivated bad behavior on these platforms, but there certainly is for gender-based bad behavior[1]
So the apparently-similar hyptothetixal is not that similar, though still useful for rhetoric.
1. https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?... (Page 20)
Nobody seems to care that dating platforms (and porn I guess) are entirely built around racial selections, among others.
On account of it's the customer choosing the service provider, albeit with the help of filters provided by an aggregator, instead of service providers denying service to customers based on their belonging to a class.
edit: I missed that you can, as a woman driver, also filter out male riders.
Actually, in this case, the rider _is_ a (temporary) employer.
If a service is not widely available in the region, any systematic discrimination leading to refusing to provide service, or specific level of service or care, based on anything unrelated to the ability to provide it, should be illegal, locally, in that community. Rules like ousting disruptive customers apply across the board.
If a service is widely available, however, then “x-only” service providers should be allowed to operate (as indeed they are with women-only gyms, Jewish-only clubs, or nightclubs that let women in first and charge the men) as long as they advertise it up front and not make people go there only to find out that “ladies can go in free of charge, men pay $300 for a table with bottle service”
PS: replace “ladies” and “men” with “whites” and “blacks” and hear how that sounds. And no, citing crime or violence statistics shouldn’t play a role in shaping whether people can get into places, whether it’s women citing male vs bear violence / harassment or people citing racial FBI statistics on violence / harassment. This is the prosecutor’s fallacy.
Right now they have all the reasons in the world to be as hands-off on their checks as they can be. They don't behave like a business with employees. It costs nothing to accept almost anyone and then just weed out the worst of the worst to avoid brand damage.
But making these changes would cut into the bottom line too much. They want all the unemployable and dangerous people to work for them because they're so desperate that they'll accept the meager pay. So instead of making any deep, difficult structural changes, they ask the software team to add a checkbox to the app. The checkbox itself is fine by me, but it's just them taping over an issue that stems from the way they do business.
Dear readers, if you wish to get rid of the stop gap, advocate for this.
It would be cool if people have better ideas, but someone criticizing this workaround doesn't need to suggest something better, and it's not weird for them to lack better ideas but still post. It's a hard problem. And "better than nothing" might get an idea approved but doesn't let it escape criticism.
It sounds like you'd rather I shut up, then you know, actually do something.
This same thing that keeps on happening when we try to reinvent things "without all that stuff that just adds friction." As with software, one should understand the underlying reasons for constraints in the old system before building the second one.
Banking -> crypto and NFT "without all that stuff..." -> wash trading.
Taxi service -> Uber "without all that employer stuff..." -> drivers with no background checks and no interview process
I understand part of this is routing around the damage of monopoly maintenance (medallion system, for example), but let's fix that instead of taking away the protections in place.
Sorry for the rant. I know this is like asking water to run uphill.
Whereas "black crime" is generally not based on reliable statistics because of overpolicing and luring you into a car is not exactly the MO there either.
Around 79-80% of violent crimes (based on victim perceptions of offenders in National Crime Victimization Survey data and arrest statistics for violent offenses).
80%+ of arrests for violent crimes in older FBI Uniform Crime Reports breakdowns (e.g., 80.1% in 2012 data, with consistent patterns in later years).
~88-90% of homicides/murders (e.g., 88% of known murder offenders in 2019 FBI data; similar in recent years where males dominate offender stats for murder).
How is this any different to "Despite making up only 13% of the population..." - https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/despite-being-only-...
It is not and that's why it is so hard to defend any kind of filtration based on gender.
How does this discrimination factor into Uber's expressive message?
