Uber either:
- lets the market equilibrium naturally settle (meaning women requesting woman drivers "pay a safety premium" - hard PR sell)
- manually suppresses the difference, creating distortions that I can't immediately imagine or articulate.
Same on the driver's side.
Pay more, or wait longer.
There's no avoiding simple economics.
You cannot give a gender more money to do the same job with the criteria being a specific gender. That is blatantly illegal.
But whether the law is enforced is a whole other question.
A simple solution then is to make the feature a `custom request for the same sex driver/passenger`. Then males can request males and females can request females. Or they (driver/passenger) can simply use it as
Imagine if I were to make an analogous claim with races rather than genders. You wouldn't even care whether there were any kind of statistical basis for the claim (I am explicitly not claiming any statistical basis for any claim of that form). You would immediately and correctly deem the claim to be racist.
Feeling threatened by the mere existence of another person, on the basis of that person's sex, race or anything else is not generally considered a rational or socially acceptable response. It's the sort of thing that results either from past life trauma or from explicit bigotry.
1) Just not socialize
2) Do things under the table.
Let people pay the premium for what they want. Sometimes there are good reasons for it. Stop pretending to have an apodictic understanding of both the world and morality.
Women drivers who are willing to drive men will have a larger customer pool than men can get. I would expect this to result in fewer male drivers.
Second, if my personal experience with Uber is typical, there aren't anywhere near enough female drivers available to serve female customers. In order to make this system work, female passengers will either need to wait much longer (for an available female driver) OR Uber will have to increase wages for female drivers (to entice more drivers). That second option is likely illegal - generally speaking, we can't determine wages strictly on gender.
I don't necessarily have a problem with the notion of females selecting female drivers/customers, but I do have concerns about rolling out an actual real-life feature in a legal and fair/equitable manner.
People who were historically against discrimination are well in to embracing it and don't see the problem at all. Why do we need to accept your preferred set of discriminations and not somebody else's?
People have been against making certain decisions on specific bases, limiting the acceptable conditions in which discrimiantion on particular bases is permissible, but literally no one has ever been against all discrimination on bases for which they sought limitations.
The change you perceive is entirely a result of you misunderstanding and oversimplifying to the point of utter nonsense the original position.
> Discrimination is the process of making unfair or prejudicial distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong,[1] such as race, gender, age, class, religion, or sexual orientation.[2] Discrimination typically leads to groups being unfairly treated on the basis of perceived statuses based on ethnic, racial, gender or religious categories.[2][3] It involves depriving members of one group of opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group.[4]
The point is that we are interested in the cases deemed unfair.
The problem is that people have wildly different ideas of what is fair.
As long as everyone is offered the same opportunity to do so, sure.
Quit trying to micromanage the public.
I am proposing that we should play by the same rules for everyone, whatever we decide the rules are.
I'm being facetious of course, but it does highlight how bad sex discrimination is.
The problem with sex discrimination here is that it is a very crude workaround for a fundamental problem, namely not being safe with some Uber drivers. I'd like to point out at this point that as a dude (especially a scrawny one) you can also get murdered or (sexually) harassed by an Uber driver (male or female). This workaround does nothing for those cases. The fundamental problem will probably simply be properly solved with driverless taxis.
When I have gotten a massage or gone to the doctor (and not seen my regular) I have been asked if I would prefer to be with a male or anyone.
Anytime you decide between options on a particular basis you are discriminating on that basis, that's what the word means.
Whether it is unacceptable (a moral judgement) or illegal (a legal judgement) discrimination are separate questions, but it absolutely and unquestionably is discrimination.
There may still be lawsuits, but it's not obvious that Uber would lose.
It's not even clear that men are at all disadvantaged by current proposal, given that the preference isn't guaranteed to be honored, so female drivers most likely will still be expected to pick up male passengers. In that case, there is essentially no scenario where a man is refused service because of his sex, and it seems questionable whether there is any grounds for legal action at all.
Uber arguably has more eyes on it, but I wonder who would file a lawsuit over this, and how they would articulate an actionable claim.
It is legal as a customer, and as an employee. It’s not as an employer or a business offering a public accommodation in general, but even there there are some exceptions; whether this situation falls into them seems likely to get litigated.
But I know there are some wrinkles like workers comp disputes where individual drivers were found to be employees for workers comp purposes.
I am pretty sure that, for example, an American employee at a fast-food place working alone late at night would not be allowed to discriminate against customers in this manner.