When women riders and drivers told us they wanted more control over how they ride and earn, we listened. That feedback led to Women Preferences, features designed to give women the choice to ride with other women. Since our first pilots last summer, we’ve heard just how much that choice matters—from feeling more comfortable in the back seat to more confident behind the wheel.
Probably gonna get flak for this, but as a man, I have no issues if women want to stick with other women and I don’t particularly care if I have the option to pick whatever driver I want.
Obviously weirdness and sexual misconduct can occur to both men and women from both men and women, but it’s disingenuous as hell to pretend that men being weird or sexual towards women isn’t the most common by a colossal margin.
No flak. I was gonna post the same thing. Women deserve to feel safe too.
Two people literally disagree with you that women should feel safe.
This is why these options are now available to women.
I think the issue people are taking is with collective punishment and validating prejudice.
I understand why women feel this is necessary, but I also understands that a policy like this paints all men with the same brush. It’s like they are saying “Since a small number of men are creeps, we give you the option to avoid all men”. Which seems to be counterproductive.
Meanwhile, Uber has invasive tracking, where they know everyone’s history. They know how many drives a customer has provisioned without incident. And I have always considered these rideshare things to be particularly safe, because all parties are consenting to the tracking. That’s not guarantee nothing will happen, of course, but it is more unlikely when all parties know Big Uber is watching you.
If Uber had rolled this out and said “you have the option to avoid rides with the opposite gender without an established history in our files”, then I think I would have less of a problem with it. But it seems like I can do everything right, and be respectful of everyone, and give Uber shitloads of money, and still be potentially waiting longer for a ride, just because of my parts. How is that OK?
It’s not about you. Repeat after me: It’s not about you. It’s about women who feel unsafe.
Most sexual assault is not reported.
And you will not be waiting longer, women who choose this service will be. So cut the pity party. You lose absolutely nothing.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think this is a genuine discrimination case. If Uber had rolled this out and said “White drivers can choose to pick up only white passengers”, would that be OK? Or even “Male drivers can choose to only pick up male passengers”?
Heck, I even think if they rolled this out and said “female users can choose a preference for only female drivers”, that might be able to fly, because it’s the buyer of the service expressing that view.
But to me, for the people offering the service, there is no difference between this and someone who doesn’t want to make a cake for a gay wedding. When you are offering a service to the general public, you can’t really discriminate like that. Yes, I understand the safety thing. But a store that catered to women wouldn’t be able to bar men from entering at all. Why is a car service any different? Yes, drivers are using their own cars, but it is still a car service.
You know what sucks the most about this? They’re probably gonna get sued over it, either by the Trump DOJ or some shitty Red State AG, who is probably gonna win.
An estimated 20% of women will be sexually assaulted in their life. Half of those will happen by the time that they’re 16. 40% of trans women will be sexually assaulted.
This isn’t about your feelings being hurt.
Large numbers of men are creeps, and I say that as a man. That’s the issue, that’s why they’re doing this.
Is there a technical definition of “large” that justifies this? If not, then this is all based on feelings.
I think it’s bad news to generalize entire large groups like this, no matter how good the intentions are.
Well yeah it’s based on feelings and it definitely just mindlessly repeating the extremely popular male bashing perspective the majority of fediverse users blindly accept as dogma, but it’s also undeniably true. A very large number of us are creeps. If you’d like to get technical, we can pull sexual crimes stats of men vs women and see which number is larger… But, do we really have to?
And it’s not that we’re inherently evil or perverse by nature. It’s that, more often than not, in one on one interactions we are the ones with the potential ability to physically dominate and coerce the human of the other sex. Every once in a while a man will delude himself, snap, explode or give in to whatever dark urge was brooding in him and use that ability in some horrible way.
The probability of an individual of whatever demographic doing something horrible is = (the probability they have the urge to attempt the horrible thing) x (the probability they have the capacity to carry out the horrible thing). It’s really not that complicated.
And If you think women would never do this if they had, on average, larger body frames, more strength and were brainwashed into seeking validation through dominance from an early age, please allow me to introduce you to the fascinating matriarchal pack dynamics of the spotted hyena, where females are larger and stronger than males. Guess which sex is more aggressive and socially dominant?
It’s not that us men are evil. It’s that on average, we have physical power that more often than not, woman do not. Any form of power has the potential to corrupt, cause it can be used for evil and therefore, every once in a while, given a large enough time frame or population, it will.
Oh please.
You know perfectly well it’s not a controversial opinion.
I only added it because I wasn’t sure if there was a population of man-children who feel slighted every time women get anything even remotely positive on Lemmy like there was on Reddit
There is. It’s substantial, but much more subtle than on Reddit. Slurs and outright sexism usually get you banned pretty quick here, so it’s largely just the casual sexism left, but it runs pretty deep. And it’s been here at least as long as I have overall (my oldest account is about 3 yo). In the original wave, the shitty population drove off the vast majority of cis female users within 6 months, which is a huge part of why the demographics around here are so heavily skewed toward men. This is also why the women’s communities, which all died out and were resurrected during the second Lemmy population boom, are so heavily policed to shut men down.
You can tell we have such a population because all posts like these about women getting anything at all, good or bad, always, without fail, have an absolute glut of comments. If you then take the time to read all of them, a solid percentage are very clearly motivated by sexism. Now, commenters are obviously self-selecting, so it’s impossible to say in absolute terms, but of the people who choose to comment on such things, and generously leaving out any comments that may just be poorly worded, I’ve typically seen between 10 and 30% of the comments have such motivations, depending how old the post is and how much visibility it got. It’s not always the same people, either, it’s different shitty people most of the time. Downvotes also flow like wine if you challenge those comments, or call out the trend.