Lyft’s new feature lets women and non-binary riders request their driver’s gender
Lyft’s new feature lets women and non-binary riders request their driver’s gender
Lyft is introducing a new feature that lets women and non-binary riders choose a preference to match with drivers of the same gender.
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.
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.
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
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 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 just learned a new word. Neat.
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.
Where are you from that all of this shit happens?
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.
What would stop me, a man, from claiming this status and requesting female drivers? While this policy was undoubtably made with good intentions, it is ripe for abuse.
Technically nothing. There is no gatekeeping in being non-binary along the lines of presentation. But you claiming this as a passenger does not effect the other passengers who are made to feel safer by the adoption of this option. A fair number of female drivers in the service are also still likely to drive for male clients regularly anyway.
However if all drivers have protections for drivers to shut down abuses by scummy clients who use the opportunity of a temporarily captive audience to be disgusting towards drivers then this overall becomes less of a concern.
Almost all forms of accommodation leave certain paths open for abuse by bad actors. Erring on the side of the person who needs additional help participating in society is usually the more ethical choice because while a bad actor can be a pain there's usually already laws on the books or policies that can be enacted that allow you to deal with one. For the person seeking accommodation the cost of not having access can mean the world becomes a smaller and/or more dangerous place because of reasons that have nothing to do with them. In some ways that can emotionally be looked at as "letting the assholes win".
How is a man asking for a woman driver abuse? Maybe I really fucking hate having to ride with dudebro cabbies and having to humor them with their inane conversations and would prefer a woman driver.
If the man proceeds to abuse the woman I would say we have a problem.
Wouldn't that make you extra liable for getting sued, because on top of whatever the driver claims you did, you also specifically chose the option you shouldn't have chosen?
Like it's basically adding an extra layer of "This guy was clearly a bad actor"
I understand the reasoning and positivity behind this and I do believe it comes from a really good place, it may even be beneficial to customers, but it is gender discrimination in the workplace, whether it leads to mostly positive outcomes for some people or not.
If your employees bring in different amounts of money because you've started to split their available workloads based on gender (especially in an industry where gender has no impact on one's ability to do the job), you're now likely to decide that due to this trend over time, to discriminate further, prioritising the more popular genders over others when hiring, and when firing, and when deciding wages.
After all, if one gender brings in less profits consistently than the others - because they're stifled by company policy - why pay them as much? It makes business sense to pay them what they're worth, and they're measurably worth less than the other genders, now.
It's a slippery slope. Well intentioned, but damages equality in the workplace.
Agreed. I 100% understand the rationale, but it has troubling implications. It only takes the one bad guy, but there are 25 other guys driving that night who would either be friendly or happily ignore you the whole ride.
I'd be interested in reading a breakdown of riders and drivers by gender in some representative areas. What I see this doing is, first yes, giving women and non-binary people an increased sense of safety (which I want to stress is still extremely important). But what I also see is an overall decline in service quality for women and non-binary people. Anecdote, not data, but I've used Lyft hundreds of times over the years in different cities. I've been picked up by maybe 3 people who weren't [presumably, I didn't ask] male identifying. On top of this, there is the possibility of certain genders earning more purely on the basis of gender. Remember - this is a bad thing for gender equality.
Something that might be better is an opt-in program with enhanced background checks, mandatory cab cameras designed to be difficult for your average person to fuck with some system for mandatory upload/secure storage of the footage, and other stuff along these lines. Do all these, regardless of gender, and you get a Secure Ride badge. The difficulty is the process and the knowledge you are under MUCH closer scrutiny. The prize is (potentially) access to a bigger piece of that that day's possible revenue.
I don't think the above is perfect, but they're steps towards a better system not based on gender lines among contractors.
Now, if they were treated like honest to god employees, this kind of thing might be easier to implement. Food for thought, Lyft.
Edit: Another thing that I think would be useful in general is a safety rating system on top of the other metrics. Have users provide anonymized data visible on the driver's profile about how safe they felt their ride was in general. Though admittedly I can see ways this could be abused or made un-useful. But I've personally been in situations where I did NOT feel safe, and would have rated them poorly in this area - but otherwise they got me home in one piece, and the reason I felt they were unsafe was they busted their ass all day and were almost nodding off.
In this situation, knowing how ratings play into Lyft and thinking about causes, my rating did not accurately reflect my actual sense of safety. An anonymous safety rating option, with comment, would have been appreciated.
Are they going to call it Cabracadabra?
This is, quite literally, a comically bad idea. This has literally been used as a punchline in fiction.
Been a while since I watched it - remind me how Cabracadabra failed?
It didn't, Bojack takes a Cabracadabra car in a later season. Todd does sell the company for $8mil though
IIRC Todd wants to let men share in the safe space. Which defeats the entire purpose for the sake of inclusivity.
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.
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?
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/
You could google a dozen articles about men being attacked by women too. Or a person of one race being attacked by a person of another race. This random list of anecdotes proves nothing.
And I could do the same for any given race.
There's at least three white people in there. My point wasn't about race. The fact that there are a lot of non white people in that selection reflects the fact that taxi drivers aren't that well paid and like a lot of poorly paid manual jobs there are quite a few immigrants doing that job. If we then extrapolate from what we know about sex offenders in society we can say that in any particular population there will be a number of sex offenders. Having said that, John Worboys, who is white, seems to be the most prolific of the bunch in there.
They are, having omitted duplicating cases, just the first results for a search for 'taxi driver rapist.' Odd that there aren't any women in the selection, no?
Oh boy, can't wait until they do that for race.
What an idiotic idea.
Why not let men do the same thing?
It might have something to do with women being at a higher risk of being abused. But unless you've been living under a rock you already knew that. So what are you really asking?
Because women have to fear men more than men have to fear women.
(numbers pulled out of my ass, but...)
99% of men don't need it so won't use it. 99% of the remainder will use it to find a target to harass. Whoever is left might miss out on a great feature, but they're barely a rounding error.
Personally, I'd love a feature that let me pick a driver that would just shut up.
It’s discrimination when a man does it
/s
I'm a little curious how they stop it.
What do men have to fear?
Getting shot, stabbed, robbed, beaten, choked, ganged up on, sexually assaulted. Weird, the exact same list that women have to fear.
Oh except men also have to worry about being falsely accused of sexual misconduct, having their names put on the sex offender registry and the entire rest of their lives ruined because no one will believe them.
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.
I mean based on how the exclusion works it's more about who they want to protect, not who they think will commit crimes. The guy in the previous post said it only does same gender matching when the feature is used, so the only reason there isn't a male driver option is because there's no feature for male passengers. (because it's same gender only)
And you're saying they didn't do their homework...while also saying they go unreported, so there wouldn't be much to research to begin with....
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.
It's probably due to the saturation of how many male drivers Lyft has. It reports that only 23% are female. While it doesn't say how many non-binary drivers there are, I doubt they make up more than a few percent. That puts men at ~75% driver share. So the chance of a a female rider, which according to Lyft are about half of their riders, being paired with is vastly smaller than a male rider getting a man.
0.5*0.75=0.375 chance for a man to get a male driver.
0.5*0.23=0.115 chance for a women to get a female driver.
While yes, you can abuse the system, you have to make a more conscious effort about being a "slimeball". This isn't necessarily a feature to prevent SH and SA, but more to make drivers and riders more comfortable.
Oh, and about the amount of code: it would be less code, as you do not need to filter and can just start a match-search.
Okay, well let me ask a question...
If a person identifies as non-binary, then what fucking business they got asking me my gender?
because someone else being non-binary doesn't make you non-binary?
they're not saying no one is allowed a gender, or that other people don't have genders
they're saying their gender is a different one beyond the usual two.
like how you don't have to just choose between vanilla or chocolate because strawberry also exists.
Look, 'non-binary', whatever the hell that's supposed to even mean, basically adds up to 'I don't want to tell you what my body structure is'
If someone doesn't want to reveal their gender to me, hey no problem by me. But privacy is a two way street ya know. What business do 'non-binary' people have asking anyone else about their sex/gender?
What's next? The "no blacks" option? I'm sure you can find studies to validate that fear too.
Lately we seem to be going backwards in equality. Men are getting shat on, especially those that haven't even committed the atrocities they are being punished for.
Why pick and choose who can use the feature to request gender. Make it fair and allow everyone or none.
There's a lot to unpack here...
But mostly I suggest you learn about the difference in equity and equality.
Equality (what you are arguing for) is treating people the same.
Equity (what this feature promotes) is giving people what they need to be successful.
Equality aims to promote fairness, but it can only work if everyone starts from the same place and needs the same help. Equity appears unfair, but it actively moves everyone closer to success by "leveling the playing field."
Equity involves trying to understand and give people what they need to enjoy full, successful lives. Equality, in contrast, aims to give everyone the same thing, which does not work to create a more equal society, only to preserve the status quo, in the presence of systemic inequalities.
Given that violent crime in the ride share industry is committed almost universally by men and disproportionately against women, this feature aims to provide equity to support more women as both riders and drivers.
Men have it so hard! 😔
Kinda telling this was your first comment when it's about women's safety and the rising number of abuses women have faced as passengers from the men driving.
This is the dumbest take I've seen. What are you even getting on about. This is just rancid bigotry veiled as concern.
What are you even basing this on? Are you afraid of black people? Or do you just hate the LGBTQIA+ community and women? Or are you still privileged as one of those two that you don't use Uber and are just spreading shits because you can?
Like it or not, Lyft is helping customers discriminate on the basis of gender. It may not have come from bad intentions, but it could have bad consequences. I’m not sure which genders will be less popular as a result of this, but they may have a harder time generating an income from Lyft. (If this feature takes off.)
I’m not saying that this feature necessarily has no place. I can empathize with people wanting to pick the gender of their driver, but it may not end up being fair for everyone.
I'm just here for my popcorn and comment entertainment. Which did not disappoint
Cool, now both Lyft and Uber need a "no extra conversation" option too. I don't want to talk to the driver when I use rideshares, I hate the incessant small talk they want me to be a part of. I know some people might like it or at the very least not mind it, but I absolutely can't stand it 9 times out of 10. Give me the option to specifically not have it please.
Last time I used Uber I remember seeing this feature as an option.
Wow, was not aware although after just looking it up, evidently it is only for 'premium' rides and not standard. As if having someone not talk to you should cost extra. 🙄
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.
Before Covid a number of companies offering female drivers for female riders popped up.
Here one, Nash Pink Ride, that just recently started:
Wasn't this a plotline in Bojack Horseman?
Lawsuit when
All the dudes complaining in here are the epitome of "wanting to be oppressed so bad". So much invalidation of women's experiences and trauma from harassment and abuse. I knew many Lemmy users were weird but God damn bro, y'all make Redditors look like saints. Until my partner stops constantly being stared at by perverted men on an almost weekly basis, I'll keep letting women decide who they're comfortable to be around.
As a man, it's honestly quite embarrassing some of these comments. My gf is tiny and one of my best friends is also a tiny woman. They endure so much shit on a daily basis without even discussing how imposing men can be in an enclosed area like a cab. I wonder how many of them in here whining are creepers themselves
I'll keep letting women decide who they're comfortable to be around
That's kind of a red herring from "a corporation providing systemic discrimination"
Not to mention the fact that no one in this thread is even disagreeing with that sentiment.
"I'll keep letting women decide who they're comfortable to be around."
Show me one comment in this thread that contradicts this statement. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Thats right, you can't. Because no one here is actually saying the thing you're accusing them of saying. You've done nothing but build your own strawman and tear it right back down. Congratulations, I guess?
Should I do that so they have a real fight instead of strawman?
Everyone in the comments getting played like a fiddle, the real takeaway here is that all “gig economy” workers deserve a guaranteed hourly salary at a livible wage
No one is getting played. What you said is completely besides the point and has nothing to do with the post. Even if correct.
It is related in a way, because this will directly harm male lyft drivers, while directly benefiting female drivers. There will be a significant discrepancy in the amount of riders available.
Not beside the point. Good or bad, this feature will mean that some workers will see less trips and make less money. That’s a simple mathematical fact.
Alternatively, in a world where gig workers made a livable salary regardless of the number of jobs slung their way, these safety changes would be much more decoupled from affecting the take-home pay of one of the poorest sector of workers in this country.