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

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191–200 of 277 posts

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

#191
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is dunking on this, but nobody is really answering why offering a filter based on race (or religion, for that matter) isn't OK, but filtering on gender is OK.

It's not primarily discrimination, though if you want to describe it as a side-effect, sure. We live in an imperfect world. Sexual assault is horrifyingly common and even normalized in banter in our culture. 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.

> (b) All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

I wonder what the implications of a woman driver denying a man using this filter would be...discrimination based on a protected class?

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

#194
post #181
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

A similar uncomfortable reality exists in rightoid spaces where theres hemming and hawwing at articles like this being blindly misandrist, despite the evidence and statistics on a societal level that men overwhelmingly commit more acts of sexual violence on strangers and deserve higher even segregation (its not even close to the same ballpark), but alas, they flee the consequences and promote a culture that critiques…

You realize your argument works double well for black people right? This is the textbook misandry I was talking about. Bigotry based off statistics is what we call stereotyping. Also, sexual violence against strangers is nothing in comparison to violence perpetuated by people you know.

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

#195
post #117
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…

The impact of false accusations don't start just with prosecution. People lose jobs and friends with it before that stage. I've personally seen people fired for a mere police investigation into something much milder that was eventually dropped.

Also, I did some checking and I can't find sources supporting "100 cases per year".

Various sources say unfounded allegations are estimated to be 5-20% in different research, while there are hundreds of thousands of sexual assault cases in the US alone. This gives an estimate of multiple thousands to tens of thousands of cases per year.

I'm also not sure why you think worrying about false conviction /allegations in DUI and drugs should preclude us from worrying about something less prevalent. Can't people take precautions on all these things that threaten one's reputation and livlihood? There are many things that could have killed you with a 0.01% chance if people didn't bother to fix them, such as battery explosions, and letting them pile up because there are other things to worry about is not the way safety engineering works.

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

#196
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a great solution. In the time between now and when that gets implemented, I'm more than happy with the stopgap. Dear readers, if you wish to get rid of the stop gap, advocate for this.

You don't get to say "these people's rights are inconvenient, so until we make it more convenient, I say we ignore their rights." We either care about sex discrimination everywhere, or we don't care about it anywhere.

Quick question, are you attracted to one gender?

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

#197
post #92

Uber is already being sued by male drivers in California: 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 c…

The wealthy Quaker drivers thing threw me. I know it's an exaggeration but is there a large enough wealthy Quaker driver population drivers ubers for this to be a concern?

I highly doubt that there is. I'm just saying that if you can discriminate on drivers based on protected characteristic Y and data suggesting that characteristic Y is more/less dangerous, then you should be able to discriminate on protected characteristic X based on similar data, or both characteristics X and Y, or characteristics X, Y, Z, U and W.

If characteristic X was race, religion or sexuality, I think people would be extremely opposed to this, and not even entertain the idea that this would be acceptable.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite being only ~49% of the population, men commit: 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 mur…

> How is this any different to "Despite making up only 13% of the population..." It is not and that's why it is so hard to defend any kind of filtration based on gender.

Hence why instead they chose to just flag my comment to hide it since it couldn't be seriously addressed.

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

#199
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get to say "these people's rights are inconvenient, so until we make it more convenient, I say we ignore their rights." We either care about sex discrimination everywhere, or we don't care about it anywhere.

Quick question, are you attracted to one gender?

Indeed I am.
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