So what I dislike about this is that the driver is the one choosing. If the customer was placing their preference, and then Lyft agrees to attempt to place them with their preference (for a surcharge of course, priority service shouldn’t be free) that would be something I could get behind. Letting drivers flat refuse service to someone based solely on their gender sounds like opening the doors to discrimination suits.
Conceptually, sure. But I imagine it’d be a potential lawsuit over workplace discrimination. Especially if the female drivers are being paid more for the same service.
Seems like this opens the door for a lawsuit to matter what. This isn’t much different than a taxi driver driving past a black guy to pick up a white guy. Just gender instead of race, and programmed into the system as a feature so they can’t even argue that they don’t have a bias.
Female workers make more in a number or jobs, especially pretty or flirtatious women make much more in jobs that have tips
Male drivers get your discrimination lawsuits ready for your lost income.
Did you even read the article? How would women drivers deciding they want more women and nb passengers cause male drivers to lose income…
How is this the most upvoted comment
deleted by creator
Next they should add white people to be able to get only white drivers to make them comfortable! /s It’s obviously sexist and not a real solution to their issues
Removed by mod
Your comment makes no sense given the details provided in the article. The toggle runs a gender-based sort on available passengers when a driver indicates they’re ready to pick up a new passenger.
- Male driver, without this toggle, indicates they’re ready for a passenger? All waiting passengers are sorted by current algorithms.
- Female+ driver, with this toggle off, indicates they’re ready for a passenger? All waiting passengers are sorted by current algorithms.
- Female+ driver, with this toggle on, indicates they’re ready for a passenger? All waiting passengers are sorted by gender then current algorithms.
At no point does the pool of available passengers for male drivers decrease.
It is zero sum, giving preference to one group in the list requires changing preferences to another groups.
Imagine you’re at Walmart queued for checkout. You form a first-in-first-out line and the first checkout available takes you. With this women+ system there’s a person sending women+ to the express checkout (>20% of total capacity) unless there are no women in line, in which case the express serves men now. At busy times both checkouts serve customers, but the women+ lines are always at least as busy as the other lines.
Obviously the algorithm for location and time based matching with ratings is different than queuing at walmart, but the principal is the same. If you have a system where A >= B it is possible to fall on the equal region, but at low traffic times or in less ride dense areas this is objectively unequal.
It is objectively always better to be in the women+ group than outside of it.
You’ve changed the perspective to potential wait time for male passengers. That may be true but it doesn’t have an adverse impact on male drivers, which is what was stated in the comment I replied to.
It is objectively always better to be in the women+ group than outside of it.
Based on Ubers data, women+ are raped five times as often in ride shares. “Objectively” I bet a lot of women+ would choose “maybe a longer wait” over “5x chance of being raped”.
I’m talking about the impact on the drivers, not the waiting time of riders (though that would also become longer on average for men, (edit: it does not change waiting time)).
I ran a simulation study of the queuing+matching system described (a variation of M/M/c queue) and there is a clear negative impact on male drivers. There are three situations: too many riders, balanced demand, and too many drivers (there’s also zero demand but we’ll ignore it).
- Too many riders: in this situation men and women+ perform the same because the matching rarely happens. Women+ riders match to women+ drivers 23% of the time. Fares for women+ drivers are 53% women+.
- Balanced demand: women+ match 23% of the time, yielding a benefit of 5-9% more fares to women+ drivers. Women+ riders match to women+ drivers ~41% of the time. Fares for women+ drivers are 80% women+.
- Too many drivers: Women+ always match in this situation, making 5.5x more fares than men. Women+ riders only match to women+ drivers. Fares for women+ drivers are 85% women+.
The disparity can in theory go up to 8x more fares for women+, but the scenario where that happens has women always available in the system.
The actual outcomes of this would vary in real life of course, and queuing theory isn’t really my thing. I assumed all women+ drivers opt in (because why wouldn’t they?) and I’m using Lyft’s own published numbers. The state of the system will oscillate between these outcomes, but in theory it should skew towards the two biased results.
Now to your point: obviously women raped and financial impact to men are two entirely different things and we can’t even begin to compare them in this way. Rape and sexual violence is abhorrent and we should take actions to reduce and stop it, the question is always: which actions are reasonable and fair.
This system is financially biased against men, and significantly so. It would reduce the event of sexual violence (by reducing male-women+ interactions). Is the system a fair tradeoff, I don’t know. My gut feeling is that I don’t like it.
Back of the bus, shitlords!
This idea of feeling safe is causing us to regress as a society. This “feature” is just discrimination wrapped in a nice sounding name — “Women Plus Connect” and UI.
We used to be able to identify the predators in our communities and do some sort of action: jail them, shame them, beat them up, whatever. Now we are using fear of them to perpetuate discrimination and AVOID them.
We were historically terrible at identifying predators and mostly let them alone to victimize or if their victims were less important destroyed victims lives as a matter of course leading to wide scale silence by victims.
We have less crime by far and prosecute more scumbags than we did 50 years ago.
Communities “handling” bad folks by individual violence never worked worth a shit because communities have always cared about whose more important than who is right and it doesn’t meaningfully scale which is why it never worked worth a shit it real life.
In order to deal with shit heads you have to have a dispassionate authority whose job it is to prosecute shit heads who isn’t politically bound to give a shit about your penny ante local bullshit and the expectation that local yokels will properly do their job and push shit up the food chain or be held accountable.
A dispassionate authority is more effective at protecting local communities from predators, but at what price? Unfortunately that dispassionate authority also has little compassion for the poor and marginalized people it rules and even less accountability to them. I’m also more afraid of the Orwellian police state being proliferated by the marriage of federal law enforcement and multinational corporations than criminals in my neighborhood. Those people breaking the law in my neighborhood probably need better access to mental healthcare instead of long sentences in federal prisons handed down by said dispassionate authority.
Our justice system is a POS but fixing it is the only reasonable path forward. Community “justice” is how we got lynchings. It was and would continue to be a horror.
I highly recommend Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States” to gain a better understanding of how and why such deplorable things took place in the US.
The actual numbers speak for themselves and the clear motivation for this feature.
About 91% of the victims of rape were riders and about 7% of the victims were drivers. Women made up 81% of the victims while men comprised about 15%
Uber releases safety data: 998 sexual assault incidents including 141 rape reports in 2020
Women Plus were 85% of the victims. This is despite the “ways” Uber has implemented to increase safety.
That’s half of the story the breakdown of drivers and riders would make it look even worse (i am assuming most drivers are actually male)
Since users choose their gender in the app, this has some potential to be used for more nefarious purposes, no?
Not a big fan of discriminatory options like this, btw.
They’d need a toggle for the feature on the rider side as well. Like “hide my gender”
Wouldn’t need it at all if rideshare drivers stopped sexually assaulting passengers
There are plenty of sexually aggressive riders too. It’s not one sided. We can summarize it thus: people suck.
Perhaps this whole “random people using their regular car to give rides to total strangers” thing was a bad idea…
What if instead the rides were given in specially modified cars that can include some security features for both parties? And in order to pay for this, perhaps there could be some kind of central company that owned the cars and simply hired the drivers?
That’s just crazy talk. Next you’ll tell us there should be really big municipally-run cars that a whole bunch of people can ride at once which makes multiple stops. Insanity!
On one hand, yes. On the other hand, have you known many companies that have successfully weeded out creeps that work there?
True! Good point
riders were the accused party 43% of the time in sexual assault incident reports
Can’t really comment on that as in my city (not US) to drive for these companies you need a license. To get the license, they perform background checks, check your criminal record, ask for medical approval, etc, every time you have to renew it, and all this seems to stop a lot of bad stuff. Not saying it doesn’t happen - you can’t never completely stop it - but there are ways to reduce it.
Anyway, they could just allow customers to select their preferred gender, would make anyone that wants to use such option happy, and we wouldn’t even have to talk about discrimination.
I’d assume if you get legal action thrown at you though, it’d be a lot harder to deny if you also were picking a gender to get specific drivers.
Legal action for picking the “wrong” option in an app? Also, “I’m gender fluid, your honor”, so good luck proving anything.
By “nefarious purposes” I meant serious stuff. Some deranged fuck decides to kill (edit: a certain gender) and there’s not much you can do after they point a gun or put a knife to the driver’s neck. It’s too late by then.
I don’t know, I understand their intention, but it seems to have some flaws.
I’m pretty sure the nefarious purpose one isn’t actually dealt with by this and is an extreme outlier
Explain how sorting the list of available passengers by gender is discrimination? It’s being rolled out in huge metropolitan markets so there will be enough drivers for everyone to get one.
@flumph if they allowed sorting the list by race, instead of by gender… would you understand how it’s discrimination, then?
The protected category doesn’t matter, I don’t see how anyone is getting a leg up or being held back by the feature.
@flumph so, if there was a button that allowed drivers to prioritize white passengers, but there wasn’t one to prioritize black passengers, that wouldn’t be discriminatory to you?
The option allows customers to prioritize drivers from two of their 3 gender groups: “female” and “non-binary”. One group is left out and if you happen to be in that group, you’ll end up doing less trips, making less money.
I wouldn’t be happy with a setting to prioritize “male”, so you can see why I’m not happy with a setting that prioritizes “female” and “non-binary”. You either give the customer the option to prioritize any gender or you don’t.
Since they can’t verify one’s gender, the potential for abuse is there. A customer could prioritise these groups if they wanted to target them and the driver could also pick one of these genders if they wanted to have people of said gender in their car.
The option allows customers to prioritize drivers…
Nope, it doesn’t. The feature is for drivers, not passengers.
So as a driver I have now a filter for better rape and murder victims? Nice!
I assume they’ll probably check with the gender people put on their drivers licenses or something.
Are they checking the customers too? If not, it seems to be an easy way for some weirdos to go around targetting genders they don’t like.
They can’t really check that you’re non binary, that’s not a sex that appears on most (any?) drivers licenses/ID.
I think this case is far fetched, the ride share company has your info which makes the legal case against you a slam dunk.
Yes, they can in. Non binary licenses are available in all 3 states that they’re piloting in. CA, AZ, and Il all have them.
That’s actually really cool to hear. Where I live it’s still “sex: M/F” but trans people are able to get it changed.
deleted by creator
On the rider side, women and nonbinary riders will see an option to “count me in” in their Lyft app. Choosing this will “increase their chances of matching with women and nonbinary drivers,” according to this blog post from Lyft.
For drivers, the feature is based on the gender marker on their license on file, and for riders, on their gender setting within the app, explained CJ Macklin, senior communications manager at Lyft, in an email to The Verge. “Both riders and drivers will have the option to update their gender settings at any time to ensure it is reflective of their personal gender identity,” said Macklin.
It’s opt-in on both sides.
Thank you, I clearly didn’t read the article.
Would be better if driver meant rider here. Or if either rider or driver could disallow matching with male binary people (or whoever they find offensive)
Great news for all the would-be predator Lyft drivers out there!
Discrimination is never a good thing. Separate but “equal” is never a good thing.
I guess that if I ever use lyft I would describe myself as whichever classification gives you more privilege. In this case I would go with non binary woman
Wow, this thread is a bunch of people spouting an updated version of the “men in women’s bathrooms is gonna lead to rape” bullshit.
Step 0: Be the sort of scum that would assault a lyft driver
Step 1: Set your identity to non binary as a rider
Step 2: Dress in a way to appear non-binary, even a little bit. Honestly just painting your nails purple and wearing thick glasses is probably enough to not raise suspicion. Most people wont try and question this and interrogate you over it. If they do, filter them off and be a normal rider.
Step 3: If they don’t question it, congrats, Lyft has no just done the work of assisting you with finding your next victim, great job Lyft!Bonus round~!
- Be a nazi
- Do steps 1-3 above
- Set your destination to be somewhere vaguely secluded where your fellow nazi friends are lying in wait.
- Congrats, Lyft has now successfully routed a non-binary identifying person directly into you and your nazi friend’s clutches, great job lyft!
So people who haven’t been doing that already are going to suddenly go out of their way using steps that will show obvious intent during future prosecution?
“Already” It’s a new feature, so no one is doing it already.
They haven’t been abusing drivers already.
Yes, targeting could conceivably make it easier but it was already possible.
targeting could conceivably make it easier but it was already possible.
I agree…
You understand this is the entire point of what I wrote though, right? That in an effort to try and make lyft safer, they have effectively done the exact opposite and literally made it easier for abusers to target victims.
Wow good way to make the women feel incredibly unsafe and easily targeted.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Choosing this will “increase their chances of matching with women and nonbinary drivers,” according to this blog post from Lyft.
If someone goes through the steps to change their gender in the app, we are going to assume that is how they identify,” Audrey Liu, Executive Vice President/Head of Design at Lyft, said in a statement.
“Inclusivity is a core value at Lyft and we are committed to creating a community in which riders and drivers feel as though they are included and belong.”
Lyft says this feature has been highly requested and will give women and nonbinary people more control over both the driving and riding experience.
Currently, that demographic accounts for less than a quarter of Lyft drivers, which is comparable with the rest of the rideshare industry, according to a report by Gridwise.
Those in launch cities can download the latest version of the Lyft app starting tomorrow, Sept. 13th to access the feature.
The original article contains 478 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wasn’t there a BoJack horseman episode almost exactly like this lmao
Yeah, this will end up just as well I’m assuming
John Wayne Gacy is really unhappy with this feature.
I look forward to seeing the same people suing over bathroom access doing the mental gymnastics to sue over this.
