Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dexerto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 277 posts

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

#151

Post by bombcar »

ShowalkKama wrote: post #142
slowmovintarget wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying it's not acceptable for a woman to choose a female driver over a male driver for a sense of her own safety? 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 par…

> 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. 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…

The point I took away is that since the normal methods of "ok discrimination" are not available and Uber refuses to do the needful on their behalf, women should be able to "use the big gun".

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.

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

#152

Post by bombcar »

brookst wrote: post #71
marky1991 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your justification for that? 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?

You mean a cake brokerage or something? 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…

> same platforms allowed racial selections

Nobody seems to care that dating platforms (and porn I guess) are entirely built around racial selections, among others.

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

#153

Post by 1718627440 »

RajT88 wrote: post #42
irl_zebra wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This incident is creepy enough that I would also not agree to a give a random stranger a ride home, absent any additional context or mitigations. Maybe to avoid waking up in an ice bath with my liver gone. But, to not give a ride because of some perceived idea that they would claim you assaulted them or something is a bit "this person should go touch some grass" or whatever.

The world we live in is one where women being assaulted is an order of magnitude larger problem than women falsely accusing someone of assault.

True, but I can control the order of magnitude of women being assaulted by me, I can't control the order of magnitude of women falsely accusing me of assault.

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

#154

Post by ShowalkKama »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #146
ShowalkKama wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

If someone is presenting themselves to you in person for entry into your bar, you have far more information to make a judgement on than the color of their skin... so it is not the same. 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…

>If someone is presenting themselves to you in person for entry into your bar, you have far more information to make a judgement on than the color of their skin... so it is not the same.

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?

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

#155

Post by darig »

paxys wrote: post #109
lordfrito wrote: post #100

Sex is a protected class under Title VII of the civil rights act. And the supreme court recently said that even majority classes (men) are protected by this. Since Uber involved in the decision to send more business to female drivers than male drivers, this would seem to me to run afoul of employment discrimination (sorry we don't need as many men workers today, too many of you competing so market forces mean we're g…

Is it illegal to set a filter for a female gynecologist over a male one? Or a male gym trainer over a female one? Or a massage service, hostel, sports team? Is it illegal to set a gender preference on a dating app? Is it illegal to issue a casting call for a female actor or model? This kind of "discrimination" is a part of society, and has been tested in courts plenty of times.

[dead]

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

#156

Post by oceansky »

paxys wrote: post #84

Does anyone have experience using this feature? I can't imagine it'll be easy to get matched with a female driver. From my own experience Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers are seemingly 99%+ men.

It's 80%.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/gamechangers/

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

#157

Post by RajT88 »

foxyv wrote: post #117
RajT88 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world we live in is one where women being assaulted is an order of magnitude larger problem than women falsely accusing someone of assault.

In addition, your chance of being falsely accused is low. Your chance of being prosecuted if you are falsely accused is low. Your chance of being convicted, if you are falsely accused AND prosecuted is low. Also, the accuser's chance of being prosecuted for making the false allegation isn't that low. We're talking about less than 100 cases per year. The real thing to be worried about is a false conviction for drugs o…

Nailed it. The amount of bandwidth men should dedicate to this is far lower than what women should be dedicating to it in terms of absolute risk.

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.

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

#158

Post by tavavex »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #136
kelseyfrog wrote: post #61

Absolutely wild that none of the dissenting comments suggest a means of lowering or eliminating sexual harassment of women passengers. Why not start there? Get creative.

You could put up a divider separating the drivers from the passengers... like in a taxi

A divider's not gonna do anything. The threat of being in someone else's car is that they can take you anywhere, keep driving you around, harass and demand things from you. It's a position of trust. Not the same kind of trust as an airline pilot and their passengers, but there's still a large imbalance.

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

#160

Post by paxys »

oceansky wrote: post #156
paxys wrote: post #84

Does anyone have experience using this feature? I can't imagine it'll be easy to get matched with a female driver. From my own experience Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers are seemingly 99%+ men.

It's 80%. https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/gamechangers/

That's skewed as it is, but I bet it'll be worse if they count miles or hours driven rather than accounts registered.
Post reply on HN