Why? This kind of sex discrimination is good. If that’s illegal, than I hope more people act illegally!
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.
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.
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.