Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US

I understood it as "there cannot be trust anymore" - mostly because different people are at risk of becoming a victim in different ways: from a crime itself, or from being falsely accused of committing a crime.

Individuals will act in a way that makes sense for them. Asking them to "just trust more" does not solve the problem - it needs to be addressed at the root (education, communities), which goes far beyond the individual level.

You can always offer to call them a cab or contact the police for them, or give them some money for the bus if its an option. If it is out in the middle of nowhere, the local police will probably help out since this kind of thing probably happens a lot.

Pretty much the same advice any normal person gives their son; a single baseless claim from a woman is enough to ruin a man's life.

"Unless you already know the woman, don't spend time alone with her" is pretty good advice.

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?

In the West it happens with males, white people, religious groups, political groups, and much more.

> enables women to be socially transgressive

That usually means, transgressing the status quo. Women (and men) are free people who can do whatever they want, unless they actually injure someone else. Exercising their freedom isn't transgression, it's the norm.

> even criminally so

What does that refer to?

You don't know me well enough to form that opinion, and you're completely, absolutely wrong.

All I did was state that this "solution" isn't quite as clear-cut as it seems, and that it will likely backfire. I'm not sure what kind of dysfunction happened in your head for you to arrive at "afraid of non-hetero sexuality"??? Maybe don't imagine things that simply are not there.

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...

We need to call a spade a spade here. This is blindly terrible logic. It's crass sex discrimination, and it's affect people's ability to find employment, and it's almost certainly against the law.

Deciding we can just start discriminating against an entire class of people in employment or housing, just because their is a subset of that class committing crimes is a civil rights violation.

People need to stop treating this like it's somehow okay because it's men.

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.

I'm rather curious where this is actually the case, particularly as you claim it's not uncommon.

My experience has been the opposite, though I'd hardly claim it to be representative. My prior employer had all single-occupant, unisex bathrooms originally, until one woman high up the management chain demanded there be women's only bathrooms. So, a women's only placard was placed on a couple of the unisex bathrooms, and suddenly, guys had to semi-frequently wait on for the remaining available unisex bathrooms during the day.

It was very clearly discriminatory, and I have no problem claiming the reverse would be just as bad.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Some recent data:

> London (2016): In a rare direct comparison, there were 154 allegations of rape or sexual assault where the suspect was a taxi or private hire driver (including Uber). Uber drivers were involved in 32 (roughly 20%) of those cases. During this period, Uber accounted for over 30% of journeys in London but only 20% of the reported assaults, suggesting Uber drivers were statistically less likely to be involved in an incident than traditional taxi drivers in that market.

That is London, not the USA of course. Who knows what other factors were at play.

For the USA we have:

> Uber (2017–2022): Reported 12,522 serious sexual assaults. This occurred across approximately 6.3 billion trips, meaning these incidents happened in about 0.0002% of rides.

> Reporting Bias: Modern apps have "emergency" buttons and digital trip trails that make reporting easier and more traceable. Historical taxi assaults were often only recorded if a formal police report was filed, leading to significant underreporting.

> Victim Demographics: In Uber's 2021–2022 data, 42% of reporters were drivers and 56% were riders. Historical taxi data rarely distinguished between driver-on-passenger vs. passenger-on-driver incidents.

> Internal Data: A 2024 government report found that while some taxi companies collect incident data, they treat it as internal information and do not share it with the public

> I’m saying that these companies need to be held responsible for their role in this problem.

People suck, and they always have. The only way for 100% safety is self-driving taxis.

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.

It is not and that's why it is so hard to defend any kind of filtration based on gender.