BeepUber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US
rImITywRMaybe Uber should be responsible for background checks of their drivers and hold them accountable for their actions and be able to fire them for misconduct. But that might require hiring drivers as actual employees. And then Uber could issue company vehicles.
Oh wait, I’m describing taxi companies that already existed before Uber.
The fact that we allow Uber/Lyft to operate as a way to skirt regulations that were put in place to keep people safe, and then trust Uber will implement work around solutions like this is ridiculous.
Same goes to AirBnB
That also only solves half of the problem. Female drivers also want to be safe and doing background checks on everyone who has an Uber account isn’t very practical.
The article says Uber lets women avoid male drivers, which implies that at the very least the Uber account is registered as female, which means female drivers could choose to only accept jobs offered through this system.
That raises the question how Uber is deciding that drivers and clients are women. Could a prospective rapist make a “female” burner account to ambush women? Are trans women who are unrecognized by the state excluded even if they’re at far higher risk than cis women?
Of course the real solution is public transit. Uber is dangerous because it means leaving two strangers together for every single journey. For the vast majority of people taking public transit, there will be many strangers in the same cabin who can all help keep each other in line.
The article briefly talks about female drivers too, which is what I talking about.
Women drivers can toggle on a preference to receive trip requests from women riders, giving them even more control over how they earn.
(and the image/gif seems to imply it’ll exclusively accept rides from women riders)
But yes, if gender is self-declared then it’d be pretty easy to abuse by a malicious rider (I assume, without proof, that drivers have to be vetted somehow). If they require a phone number for new rider accounts it shouldn’t be too hard to keep banned malicious users out, though. There are more foolproof ways, but they have other issues (e.g. ID verification is a privacy nightmare and potentially transphobic depending on local government policies).
It’s been a little while since I’ve used any sort of taxi service because the local public transit is pretty good, but I know a lot of the USA isn’t so lucky there either. That’s more of a cultural problem though.
On a semi-related note, it’s quite ironic that Uber made a change for only their home nation on International Women’s Day.
It wouldn’t even solve the half of the problem, though. Men stop harassing women as soon as they are full time employees, what? Background checks are going to prevent harassment, what?
It’s because men are hazed into behaving in a fucked up way, like “grab her by the pussy, what are you, gay?” type of behavior by other men. It’s fucked up, and there is no authority dealing with these problems at the root. Other men want to fit in, and this soon becomes their actual personality.
While I agree with this, and I’m not defending skirting regulations, before rideshare apps, taking taxis was an awful experience. At least half the time, if you try to pay with a credit card, the machine was “broken”, if you wanted to get a ride at a specific time you had to call ahead and hope that a taxi would show up.
Rideshsre apps forced regular taxis to up their game and provide better service, some did and now have their own apps.
I don’t even know what regulations they are skirting. You can’t just sign up to become a driver without submitting information just like any other job. Background checks are required, licenses and what not. People are also supposed to leave feedback if they had a bad experience so I could only imagine what the complaints would be surrounding the idea that Uber isn’t following up on the feedback enough. That said it 500 people ride with that driver and rate them well, and 1 person says they were a perv, and Uber looks at it and finds that person has called several male drivers pervs while they get good ratings from everyone else, there could be a problem that those people have a type, or Uber could be thinking the issue is the rider at that point
Uhh I traveled to san Fransisco and there was an Uber booth in mall I was getting some necessities for. The booth dude was like hey come earn some money. I’m not from here , no worries that doesn’t matter, ok well I don’t have a car. That’s fine we can get you sorted on that, it’s a great way to make I little extra money.
No dude I’m not interested.
If you change your mind come back
Someone trying to sell you a job, that’s interesting. I wonder if they do that at certain times of the year places. I imagine you need a lot more Uber drivers in specific areas for events. Like if Comicon is happening, you suddenly have hundreds of thousands of people coming to the area that will spike the number of people needing rides. I assume the same happens with the Superbowl, Mardi Gras, soon to be the World Cup, etc.
lortyI dont think that this is really the problem uber is solving here.
I dont think women passengers or drivers are being physically assaulted during an uber ride, they just feel uncomfortable with men. Maybe its flirting, maybe its a fertive glance, maybe its nothing. It doesn’t really matter whether male drivers have ever done anything to deserve being avoided, the point is that women want to avoid them.
Im a guy. I feel a bit awkward about this, as if someone had said to me “I dont want to interact with you because you might rape me”. Its not a nice feeling but its a misconception of what’s really happening.
Ultimately in any specific instance where a woman chooses not to interact with a man, I absolutely believe its her right to do so. However, I do hope that society doesn’t reach a point where women in general make that choice as a matter of routine.
Uber stopped doing then, but their own data through 2022 claims that 99.9998% of rides ended without a safety incident.
Most sexual assault is committed by abusers who know their victims, not random strangers.
Agreed. Contract work that isn’t actually contract work should be illegal.