That assumes that women drivers are and can be a problem, but are they? Highly doubt it. They’re probably the least problematic as far as sexual assault goes, which is the whole reason for this.
Women are roughly ~60% as likely to commit IPV assault or sexual assault or stalking as men, so… using that as a proxy, yeah, its less, but its not insignificant.
As the other reply to your comment mentions, I’m a guy, I have been both physically and sexual assaulted by women.
… Do I not exist?
There are roughly 60% as many male victims of female IPV violence/sex assault as there are women who are victims of men.
IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:
About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.A
Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
IPV starts early and continues throughout people’s lives. When IPV occurs in adolescence, it is called teen dating violence. About 16 million women and 11 million men who reported experiencing intimate partner violence in their lifetime said that they first experienced it before age 18.
But hey, I know not all women are like what I’ve been through, from more than one woman.
Took a lot of therapy to get a hold of the PTSD, but maybe one day I’ll feel comfortable enough to seriously date again.
In the meantime, yeah, I am at least healed enough that I don’t personally feel the need to request only male uber drivers…
But that’s the thing, people in these comments keep bringing up statistics that are only tangentially related. IPV requires a level of trust and intimacy that’s not present at the job. Most of the schemes that I know women do in abusive relationships can’t exactly be pulled off from the driver’s seat with a stranger.
The stats are meant to be illustrative of the fact that women are also capable of, and do, commit assault and sexual assault in large numbers.
You’re just missing the point.
In your other reply you mention a magnitude of difference as being important, after asserting the one that exists is surely so massive that its not a problem.
Ok here’s an attempt at giving you that magnitude, ah, but, now its not precise enough, the situations are too dissimilar.
The point is women can be, and certain women are dangerous, and the extent to which that is common is not trivial, and is not hugely lopsided toward men just always doing all the bad things at an order of magnitude difference, 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, its more like a 1/3 to 2/3 difference.
You opened with highly doubting that women can be dangerous.
Uh, they can be.
They are ‘somewhat less dangerous than men’.
Not ‘so much far less dangerous than men as to be statistically negligible’.
Do you want me to pull stats on how many women have ever gotten arrested for a violent crime?
That number is not 0.
What I am getting for asking various AIs this question is that in the US, the overall crime.rate is going down, but since the 90s, the proportion of violent crimes committed by women is going up.
This data is not like, easily accessed, it would be an significant academic research task to attempt to properly answer this question, so, I’m ok with using an AI with sources for an ballpark estimate.
I’m asking duckduckgo’s duck.ai, if you want to check this.
In 2023, we’ve got ~880k violent crimes committed by men.
In 2023, we’ve got ~320k violent crimes committed by women.
Assuming thats one crime per person, we assume US population is 350 million, and its a 5050 population sex split, we get:
Chance a US man committed a violent crime in 2023: 0.0050%
Chance a US woman committed a violent crime in 2023: 0.0018%
Proportion of 2023 violent crimes committed by men: 73 1/3%
Proportion of 2033 violent crimes committed by women: 26 2/3%
Or, put back into my original phrasing…
Women are 30% as likely as a man is to commit any violent crime.
Which is, ok, half of what I said with IPV stats, half of ~60%.
But again, we are at proportional difference levels, not orders of magnitude difference levels.
So what this means, what Uber and Lyft are doing, is something like allowing discrimination against all their male drivers, so that the chance a woman gets assaulted goes down from ~0.005% to ~0.002%.
Something roughly in that ballpark.
Thats what you call massive losses for a mostly innocent group, for basically imperceptible gains, in comparison to the losses sustained by the group.
Women choosing only women drivers do not become 1100% (10x) or 100% (2x) or 50% (1.5x) safer by doing so.
They only become about ~0.0032% (~1.0032x) safer.
If you routinely did things because of that level of safety margin improvement, you can justify basically any decision at the level that it will make you 3 thousandths of a percent safer.
Yeah, these are estimates, they’re far from perfect, but this is the ballpark we are in.
Its ludicrous, from a mathematical standpoint, to attempt to justify this behavior. It is irrational. It is paranoid.
Maybe if you’re ubering to work every single day of the week, ok sure it becomes a cumulative thing, at that point you’d save money with a personal chauffeur, so that’s also kind of ridiculous.
women are also capable of, and do, commit assault and sexual assault in large numbers
Those statistics being thrown at me are for women in relationships, not two strangers in a cab.
Ok here’s an attempt at giving you that magnitude, ah, but, now its not precise enough, the situations are too dissimilar.
Wait, somehow pointing out the imprecision is a problem? Why isn’t the imprecision the problem instead?
You opened with highly doubting that women can be dangerous.
We’re talking about sexual assault. If you have the numbers of sexual assaults committed by women drivers towards passengers, I’d love to see them. Even better if they’re compared to the men drivers.
its more like a 1/3 to 2/3 difference.
Not for sexual misconduct, that’s for violence in general, so it’s imprecise. I’m not denying those numbers for what they are.
They are ‘somewhat less dangerous than men’. Not ‘so much far less dangerous than men as to be statistically negligible’.
You talk like you got the numbers. Let’s see them.
Do you want me to pull stats on how many women have ever gotten arrested for a violent crime? That number is not 0.
Great, we’re not talking about that.
What I am getting for asking various AIs this question
Please don’t. I use AI too, and I know firsthand this is not something you can trust them with.
You’re just missing the point.
By the looks of it, so are you. You’re talking about general violence when I’m not.
The only thing I will concede is the frequency of these assaults relative to the number of uneventful rides. And yet, people here would rather have thousands of cases of sexual assault by doing nothing about it because of some ill-perceived reframing. I swear the men in the comments are talking about this as if it’s some Jim Crow law being put in place when it’s not. It’s nothing but pearl-clutching.
Yes. Of the two, they are the least likely sex to sexual assault. That’s not the flex you think it is.
Does that mean they’re never problematic? Not a problem worth preventing with a simple search filter? A search filter they already have the inverse of? One they could implement before the weekend?
I personally know 2 guys who’ve been sexually harassed and assaulted by women. One who was actually raped by a woman. It happens less often, sure. But saying that it’s not worth doing the bare minimum to prevent it, is dumb.
At a ratio of about a magnitude difference, I think it is. For every one woman committing assault, several men are doing the same.
Not a problem worth preventing with a simple search filter?
The main issue is the weaponization of that filter. The original purpose is addressing a problem as a band-aid, and the inverse is handing out a loaded gun. It’s not foolproof, but by the looks of these thousands of lawsuits, it’s better than nothing.
I personally know 2 guys who’ve been sexually harassed and assaulted by women.
What makes you think I haven’t been assaulted by women a couple of times? I’ve been sexually assaulted by men a whole lot more since I was 16. What’s your point? I know about 10 women who have suffered sexual and physical violence, and I know about four men who have suffered the same. We can’t deny this is a lopsided issue that affects a whole lot of people that we all know.
That only solves the problem if there is an equal demand for both. Assuming there isn’t, the male drivers still have a claim for lost income as a result of their gender.
It solves Uber’s problem, in that Uber set up a feature to favor one sex.
Men drivers can’t blame the public if there isn’t as much demand for their services.
That doesn’t make any sense. Can male strippers sue that there’s not as big demand for them as there is for female strippers? I don’t think so. (This is just a metaphor, I have no idea how big the male stripper business is, but that’s not the point, I’m sure you could come up with a similar example where gender is an advantage, becasue there’s simply smaller demand for the other gender).
We’re not discussing preference as in attraction, we’re discussing the preference of women customers for women drivers due to the significantly greater incidence of violence and sexual assault commited by men specifically towards women, which is also not a choice
Sounds like Uber and Lyft should stop hiring drivers who sexually harass customers.
When I said “bone fide” I meant that attraction isn’t a choice. In the case of an Uber driver gender preference is a choice.
Based on your “customer preference” logic could I also say my preference is race based because I found a similar statistic? Would that justify Uber allowing race selection?
We have laws that protect people from discrimination on protected grounds (race, gender, sexual orientation, age etc…) not because there are no legitimate statistical reasons for people to have a preference, but because the damage to society caused by discrimination based on characteristics you can’t change about yourself far exceeds these benefits.
Sounds like Uber and Lyft should stop hiring drivers who sexually harass customers.
Hey I completely agree with that!
Maybe instead of punishing their entire male driver base, 99.9% of whom have not sexually assaulted a passenger, they could adopt some screening standards, have some regular, mandatory instructional courses with scored tests at the end, do some background checks!
Preferring not to be assaulted is not a choice, the reality that men are more likely to commit these crimes is also not a choice, and the fact that the specific scenario of driver and lone passenger is much higher risk is also extremely relevant. It would be nice if Uber cared enough to try screening their employees more carefully, but offloading cost and responsibility onto someone else is more profitable so I wouldn’t count on it happening any time soon. You could possibly find a statistic to support being a bigot, but it would definitely be bullshit. International crime statistics and legal & sociological analysis directly contradicts racially biased US crime stats, whereas they instead fully confirm this specific gender bias in crime stats. One is true, the others are not. Allowing women to make choices that affect their safety based on verifiable facts is entirely reasonable, I don’t particularly care if men find it discriminatory.
Ok, lets say I prefer only male customer service representatives, front desk receptionists, only male grocery store check out clerks, only male baristas, hairstylists, tattoo artists, auto mechanics, chefs/cooks, restaurant servers, daycare providers, dog walkers, whatever.
Now, I only use businesses where my ‘consumer preference’ is ‘respected’, and there are so many others who have similarly strong preferences to me, that businesses begin to either gender bias their hiring, or offer specific locations that are gender locked, or offer me some kind of filter for non location based / scheduled / on demand enterprises.
Am I being sexist, or am I expressing my consumer preferences?
Are the businesses being sexist, or are they aligning business practices with consumer expectations?
What if femboys, queer men, trans men, well, they’re not men to me, I don’t want to see any of them, so I stop using businesses who hire them, or at least allow me some option to avoid them?
What if I also only want to interact with white, christian men?
Who are 25 to 45 years old?
… How do you draw the lines between ‘businesses reflecting consumer demand’ and ‘the inherent structure of society is bigoted and segregated’?
Why do you draw those lines, which lines do you draw or not draw?
None of those scenarios puts the customer at greater risk of being a victim of a violent or sexual crime, none of them put the employee in question alone with the customer in an unmonitored vehicle, easy line to draw
Tattoo artists do not generally have their customers alone in an unmonitored vehicle with the ability to relocate them easily against their will, neither do masseuses or any of your other examples. Weak comparisons, weak argument.
It is already no problem for you to choose a male tattoo artist, a male hairstylist and a male dogwalker. Whereever you choose a single employee to work closely with you and where you are in a somewhat vulnerable position you can already choose. If for some reason you feel more at ease with male doctors, tattoo artists or hairstylists or massagist, noone is stopping you from only booking with a man.
Whereever you can be in a vulnerable position with an employee it makes sense that you can choose who that person is.
Ok so you also seem to be describing ‘being in a vulnerable position’ as a, or the ‘line’.
Can you define that explicitly, you know, as if it were part of a law?
I will note that tons of people have anxiety/trauma complexes that trigger in public, or in private, with people.of specific sexes, genders, races, expressed religions, etc… so… are all of those things fair game for things that can cause people to feel ‘in a vulnerable position’?
Some people don’t really even have any specific personal trauma, but are just bigotted and some way, and would tell you that… certain people with certain attributes in certain situations make them feel ‘vulnerable’.
I would say basically if the person is working on/with your body or if they have some form of physical power over you which is the case if you are getting in their car (and they could in theory lock you in/drive you somewhere else).
It is e.g. totally fine if a black person would prefer another black person as a hair stylist because they feel they know more about black hair. Same goes for a white person prefering a white hair stylist.
At a certain point you should probably ask yourself if you can still participate in society if your demands get too detailed. I would draw the line where the interaction is very unpersonal and takes place in a public setting. Everybody can have a one-minute exchange with any chashier. But as soon as the employee is going to work on your body or put you in a position where you can’t easily leave it’s fair to choose who works with you.
I know a lot of people who have a gender preference when it comes to doctors. Not just gynecologists, but any. I know people who’d only go to a male or female massage therapist. I know asians who’d only go to an asian hairdresser. These are all choices people make every day, we just don’t notice because we don’t filter it through an app.
As for bigotted people, I don’t think you’ll change their mind by forcing them to interact with you. If I was e.g. a hindu driver I might even feel safer knowing that people who hate my religion can choose not to be in my car. The safety concern goes both ways.
Can you explain that to me, how either collectively, or personally, male drivers are somehow all responsible for their services being valued less, less in demand?
Walk me through it.
I’m a guy, never done uber or lyft before, lets say I’m gonna start tomorrow.
Why and or how is it my fault that I’d be less in-demand as a driver than a woman driver?
Nearly all of the significant number of sexual assaults by Uber drivers have been committed by men. So we, as men, if we become Uber drivers, are statistically significantly more likely to commit sexual assault because we are men.
It’s not personally your fault, but it is the fault of the cohort you’d join, male drivers, who have created the statistical anomaly by doing all those sexual assaults.
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, or sexual orientation are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever."[3]
Relevant case:
The California Supreme Court also decided that the act outlaws sex-based prices at bars (ladies’ nights): offering women a discount on drinks, but not offering the same discount to males. In Koire v Metro Car Wash (1985) 40 Cal 3d 24, 219 Cal Rptr 133, the court held that such discounts constituted sex stereotyping prohibited by this Act.[8]
Uber and Lyft drivers are independent contractors, ie, they are procuring services from Uber and Lyft, the businesses.
In July 2024, in the case of Castellanos v. State of California, the California Supreme Court issued a ruling which upheld a voter-approved law that allows app-based transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft to classify their drivers as independent contractors, and not as employees.
Thus, they, men, are a protected class when acting as independent contractors, and being treated in one way or another by the business they are contracting with.
So, that means, that this is far from a frivolous class action.
Nonetheless, if you are subjected to blatant discrimination as an independent contractor, you may have protection under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act which mandates that “[a]ll 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.” The Unruh Civil Rights Act has been used to obtain protection for independent contractors experiencing discrimination in business relationships, but it does not apply to employment relationships.
If you gave the explanation that you just gave me, to a court, in CA… you would lose, and the men bringing the case would win, because you have just plainly admitted you (figuratively, as Uber/Lyft) are doing discrimination.
The alternative sets a precedent that independent contractors cannot be protected from sex based discrimination.
Which uh, would be very problematic, for say uh, strip clubs and modelling, which tend to also actually largely to entirely also be contractor configurations, not full employee configurations.
Or, Uber and Lyft, in CA at least, have to treat everyone who drives for Uber and Lyft, in CA, as actual employees… which would grant them various benefits, but would also allow for the ‘female driver only’ option to still exist in CA.
Theres… no other, more statistically significant profile to sexually assaulting drivers than just ‘they are men’?
There’s no training regimen or qualifying standards, no background check… ?
I think you’re missing the simple fact that it’s the passenger who’s choosing. I get to pick my doctor based on sex, my therapist, my massage therapist.
No, you’re missing the entire concept of Civil Rights and Anti Workplace Discrimination laws.
Just replace sex with race, or height, or disability status, or sexual orientation, and you can see how you are making a fool of yourself.
People have to do these jobs. If you just say a class of people can be prevented from doing these jobs, then you don’t believe in employee/worker rights.
And again, no its not just the passenger who is picking.
Its the business that is allowing their contractors to be discriminated against, when it comes to the awarding of micro-contracts, based on their sex alone.
Businesses, and the government, are not allowed to unfairly discriminate based on things that are irrelevant to the contract itself, in how they award contract work. That’s already illegal, in many other contexts.
Its a worker rights issue, not a consumer choice issue.
Uber or Lyft could actually do effective things to weed out bad drivers… effectively cutting half of their drivers payout down by roughly a third… is not a sensible way to do that.
And yes, a man or a woman being your driver is irrelevant. 99.99% of male drivers do not assault their passengers. The chance that a female driver is going to be safer than a male driver is statistically indistinguishable from 0.
Why is it acceptable and legal for me to choose my doctor, therapist, many folks doing a service for me whether as employees or not then?
If I pay for only-fans content, I choose who’s. Why not let people choose their drivers? Why is this e different from the other examples like doctor or adult content?
I understand and support there being an option for woman-only drivers. It’s unfortunte that it’s required, but women has to deal with a lot of harrasment and I don’t see a reason why not provide a safer option for them. (I’m not implying that creep women exist, or that men don’t have to deal with similar problems, but it’s simply way less common).
I don’t agree with this lawsuit, but adding a men-only option would solve the issue from legal standpoint. You are not giving someone advantage over their gender, both have the same options, and it’s up to the customer/market to decide which one they preffer. The people suing Lyft for providing an option that’s unfortunately required because women have to deal with a lot of creeps can get fucked, and this is the best way how to do it.
If you replace sex with race you’ll realise that you’re completely wrong. There is no legal reason to choose your driver’s gender, just like there is no reason to choose your driver’s race. The fact that some drivers harass women is because Uber and Lyft don’t screen drivers sufficiently to protect passengers.
Hmm, you are right, replacing gender with race does make a good point I didn’t realize. “I want to be able to choose a white driver because I wouldn’t feel safe with a driver of different race” is basically the same point as with gender, but sounds way more wrong and it shows pretty well why is the whole idea a bad one.
At least I’m struggling to find any arguments for the gender version (which is not a bad thing, mind you), if I take this race example into account. You are right that way more rigorous screening of drivers with 0-strike policy would be a lot better than this.
In general this might work for a lot of similar situations, treating gender as a race. I’ll keep that in mind, because it makes sense and I never really though about it that way. Thanks!
But this is not a race issue. This is a gender and sexual one. Dragging race into this is only a convenient excuse to make it something that it’s not, so that you can argue against it by using a false equivalent analogy.
Do we have statistics on any one ethnicity of drivers harassing some other ethnicity of passengers so often to generate upwards of 2,300 lawsuits? I doubt it. The only motivation behind this is the male sexual drive.
I could easily justify asking for a different race driver to prevent the high same race victimisation rate. Unless I was Asian then I would prefer an Asian driver.
Actually Asian crimes are so low everyone who l should just pick Asian drivers to significantly reduce their risk of being victimised.
Also your framing of this gendered violence as caused by “male sexual drive” is dangerous misandry. Male on female violence is a cultural issue caused by people like you accepting that male sexual violence is an inherent and unavoidable part of being male (i.e. rape culture). In reality it’s exactly like speeding, as long as we treat it as unavoidable and natural it’s going to be prevalent everywhere. Yet many countries have almost eliminated speeding and the pedestrian and cyclists deaths it causes through cultural and structural changes. Same goes for countries that have a fraction of north american rape statistics.
We need to stop accepting sexual violence by anyone against anyone. One of those steps is to actually screen and punish drivers who sexually harass customers. That’s what the 2300 lawsuits are about, ride share companies routinely ignore sexual assault reporting and empower sexual victimization of their clients. The other is to stop accepting that “boys will be boys” includes rape and sexual assault. None of those steps is acting like the only way to stop rape is to hide women from men.
Your logic empowers rapists. The “what was she wearing” defense will soon become the “what was her driver sex preference” defense and lawyers will start arguing that women who don’t select “female driver” are being promiscuous and looking to have sex with a male driver. Why else would they not pick “female driver” after all?
For ride-share drivers? Where? Those are general statistics for the general population. Why are these relevant for a skewed sample of the population? And more importantly, how are those relevant for places like my country, which happens to be a lot more ethnically homogeneous, but that still sees these sexual assaults happening?
Also your framing of this gendered violence as caused by “male sexual drive” is dangerous misandry
Is it, though, if the statistics for sexual crimes based on sex consistently turn up at a 9:1 ratio for males vs females? That’s a whole magnitude of difference that you can’t ignore. And this is the Mexican government putting out these statistics for cases of sexual assault and rape at a national level. The ones I’ve seen for the US are very similar.
male sexual violence is an inherent and unavoidable part of being male
And yet the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male. Have I been groped by women? Yes. Can I be raped by a woman? Of course. But the fact of the matter is that I’m way more likely to be a victim of sexual assault by other men, and I have been multiple times throughout the years. You can’t deny this is the overall trend in every society that has ever existed.
as long as we treat it as unavoidable and natural
The fact of the matter is that male sexual violence is a part of many species’ biology, including our own. Do you really think that rape is not a viable reproductive strategy in several species? It’s time to face reality, and that’s not necessarily mysandrist despite all this pearl-clutching. If men didn’t do it disproportionately, we wouldn’t be having this exchange. Simple as that.
Your logic empowers rapists.
Only if you frame it under the tired adage of “boys will be boys” as if I’m the one saying that. That’s all you. My POV is based on academic publishing that I’ve read throughout the years.
We need to stop accepting sexual violence by anyone against anyone.
They used to have similar studies to show that black people had lower IQ.
Sexual assault is a crime. Criminals commit crimes. This isn’t supposed to be a “Men against Women” thing. It’s criminals vs. victims. Of course men will commit more VIOLENT crimes like SA than women, men have a biological strength advantage which really helps commit violent crimes. I don’t deny biology.
But if we act like it’s more than that, that men are inherently going to sexually assault women and there is nothing we can do about it other than hide women, we’re accepting that sexual assault as an unavoidable part of everyday life instead of treating it like the unacceptable crime it is.
They used to have similar studies to show that black people had lower IQ.
No, because you’re imagining that that’s what the report said based on what you want to think and are drawing historical connections to a situation that is only superficially similar.
But if we act like it’s more than that, that men are inherently going to sexually assault women
And yet it keeps happening at a disproportionate rate. It seems to me that you say you don’t want to deny the biology, but don’t hesitate to deny the behavior.
Mind you, I’m not saying that all men are rapists because I’m also a man and I know that’s not true. I’m saying the great majority of sexual assaulters are men, so let’s address that by giving people who are hesitant a choice. I think we can both agree on that, no?
Just add a men-only option. Problem solved.
I mean, you’d think that would make sense, right?
But try arguing that if Tinder adds a visually verified height filter, it should also add a visually verified weight filter.
That assumes that women drivers are and can be a problem, but are they? Highly doubt it. They’re probably the least problematic as far as sexual assault goes, which is the whole reason for this.
Women are roughly ~60% as likely to commit IPV assault or sexual assault or stalking as men, so… using that as a proxy, yeah, its less, but its not insignificant.
As the other reply to your comment mentions, I’m a guy, I have been both physically and sexual assaulted by women.
… Do I not exist?
There are roughly 60% as many male victims of female IPV violence/sex assault as there are women who are victims of men.
Thats millions of people, in both categories.
https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html
But hey, I know not all women are like what I’ve been through, from more than one woman.
Took a lot of therapy to get a hold of the PTSD, but maybe one day I’ll feel comfortable enough to seriously date again.
In the meantime, yeah, I am at least healed enough that I don’t personally feel the need to request only male uber drivers…
But that’s the thing, people in these comments keep bringing up statistics that are only tangentially related. IPV requires a level of trust and intimacy that’s not present at the job. Most of the schemes that I know women do in abusive relationships can’t exactly be pulled off from the driver’s seat with a stranger.
Right, and that’s in the context of dating.
The stats are meant to be illustrative of the fact that women are also capable of, and do, commit assault and sexual assault in large numbers.
You’re just missing the point.
In your other reply you mention a magnitude of difference as being important, after asserting the one that exists is surely so massive that its not a problem.
Ok here’s an attempt at giving you that magnitude, ah, but, now its not precise enough, the situations are too dissimilar.
The point is women can be, and certain women are dangerous, and the extent to which that is common is not trivial, and is not hugely lopsided toward men just always doing all the bad things at an order of magnitude difference, 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, its more like a 1/3 to 2/3 difference.
You opened with highly doubting that women can be dangerous.
Uh, they can be.
They are ‘somewhat less dangerous than men’.
Not ‘so much far less dangerous than men as to be statistically negligible’.
Do you want me to pull stats on how many women have ever gotten arrested for a violent crime?
That number is not 0.
What I am getting for asking various AIs this question is that in the US, the overall crime.rate is going down, but since the 90s, the proportion of violent crimes committed by women is going up.
This data is not like, easily accessed, it would be an significant academic research task to attempt to properly answer this question, so, I’m ok with using an AI with sources for an ballpark estimate.
I’m asking duckduckgo’s duck.ai, if you want to check this.
In 2023, we’ve got ~880k violent crimes committed by men.
In 2023, we’ve got ~320k violent crimes committed by women.
Assuming thats one crime per person, we assume US population is 350 million, and its a 5050 population sex split, we get:
Chance a US man committed a violent crime in 2023: 0.0050%
Chance a US woman committed a violent crime in 2023: 0.0018%
Proportion of 2023 violent crimes committed by men: 73 1/3%
Proportion of 2033 violent crimes committed by women: 26 2/3%
Or, put back into my original phrasing…
Women are 30% as likely as a man is to commit any violent crime.
Which is, ok, half of what I said with IPV stats, half of ~60%.
But again, we are at proportional difference levels, not orders of magnitude difference levels.
So what this means, what Uber and Lyft are doing, is something like allowing discrimination against all their male drivers, so that the chance a woman gets assaulted goes down from ~0.005% to ~0.002%.
Something roughly in that ballpark.
Thats what you call massive losses for a mostly innocent group, for basically imperceptible gains, in comparison to the losses sustained by the group.
Women choosing only women drivers do not become 1100% (10x) or 100% (2x) or 50% (1.5x) safer by doing so.
They only become about ~0.0032% (~1.0032x) safer.
If you routinely did things because of that level of safety margin improvement, you can justify basically any decision at the level that it will make you 3 thousandths of a percent safer.
Yeah, these are estimates, they’re far from perfect, but this is the ballpark we are in.
Its ludicrous, from a mathematical standpoint, to attempt to justify this behavior. It is irrational. It is paranoid.
Maybe if you’re ubering to work every single day of the week, ok sure it becomes a cumulative thing, at that point you’d save money with a personal chauffeur, so that’s also kind of ridiculous.
Those statistics being thrown at me are for women in relationships, not two strangers in a cab.
Wait, somehow pointing out the imprecision is a problem? Why isn’t the imprecision the problem instead?
We’re talking about sexual assault. If you have the numbers of sexual assaults committed by women drivers towards passengers, I’d love to see them. Even better if they’re compared to the men drivers.
Not for sexual misconduct, that’s for violence in general, so it’s imprecise. I’m not denying those numbers for what they are.
You talk like you got the numbers. Let’s see them.
Great, we’re not talking about that.
Please don’t. I use AI too, and I know firsthand this is not something you can trust them with.
By the looks of it, so are you. You’re talking about general violence when I’m not.
The only thing I will concede is the frequency of these assaults relative to the number of uneventful rides. And yet, people here would rather have thousands of cases of sexual assault by doing nothing about it because of some ill-perceived reframing. I swear the men in the comments are talking about this as if it’s some Jim Crow law being put in place when it’s not. It’s nothing but pearl-clutching.
Yes. Of the two, they are the least likely sex to sexual assault. That’s not the flex you think it is.
Does that mean they’re never problematic? Not a problem worth preventing with a simple search filter? A search filter they already have the inverse of? One they could implement before the weekend?
I personally know 2 guys who’ve been sexually harassed and assaulted by women. One who was actually raped by a woman. It happens less often, sure. But saying that it’s not worth doing the bare minimum to prevent it, is dumb.
At a ratio of about a magnitude difference, I think it is. For every one woman committing assault, several men are doing the same.
The main issue is the weaponization of that filter. The original purpose is addressing a problem as a band-aid, and the inverse is handing out a loaded gun. It’s not foolproof, but by the looks of these thousands of lawsuits, it’s better than nothing.
What makes you think I haven’t been assaulted by women a couple of times? I’ve been sexually assaulted by men a whole lot more since I was 16. What’s your point? I know about 10 women who have suffered sexual and physical violence, and I know about four men who have suffered the same. We can’t deny this is a lopsided issue that affects a whole lot of people that we all know.
Your argument is literally “Since one problem is worse, it justifies actively avoiding doing anything about the other.”
I think you got it backwards.
Then it seems you failed to explain yourself clearly.
Or you failed to read properly.
That only solves the problem if there is an equal demand for both. Assuming there isn’t, the male drivers still have a claim for lost income as a result of their gender.
It solves Uber’s problem, in that Uber set up a feature to favor one sex.
Men drivers can’t blame the public if there isn’t as much demand for their services.
That doesn’t make any sense. Can male strippers sue that there’s not as big demand for them as there is for female strippers? I don’t think so. (This is just a metaphor, I have no idea how big the male stripper business is, but that’s not the point, I’m sure you could come up with a similar example where gender is an advantage, becasue there’s simply smaller demand for the other gender).
Gender is a bone fide job requirement for strippers. That’s not the case for taxi drivers.
The gender “requirement” for strippers is based on customer preference, if Uber customers prefer a gender for drivers then the same is true here
The gender you’re attracted to isn’t a choice or a “preference”.
We’re not discussing preference as in attraction, we’re discussing the preference of women customers for women drivers due to the significantly greater incidence of violence and sexual assault commited by men specifically towards women, which is also not a choice
Sounds like Uber and Lyft should stop hiring drivers who sexually harass customers.
When I said “bone fide” I meant that attraction isn’t a choice. In the case of an Uber driver gender preference is a choice.
Based on your “customer preference” logic could I also say my preference is race based because I found a similar statistic? Would that justify Uber allowing race selection?
We have laws that protect people from discrimination on protected grounds (race, gender, sexual orientation, age etc…) not because there are no legitimate statistical reasons for people to have a preference, but because the damage to society caused by discrimination based on characteristics you can’t change about yourself far exceeds these benefits.
You keep saying “bone fide” in relation to strippers when you mean “
bonafide” bonerfied.Hey I completely agree with that!
Maybe instead of punishing their entire male driver base, 99.9% of whom have not sexually assaulted a passenger, they could adopt some screening standards, have some regular, mandatory instructional courses with scored tests at the end, do some background checks!
Preferring not to be assaulted is not a choice, the reality that men are more likely to commit these crimes is also not a choice, and the fact that the specific scenario of driver and lone passenger is much higher risk is also extremely relevant. It would be nice if Uber cared enough to try screening their employees more carefully, but offloading cost and responsibility onto someone else is more profitable so I wouldn’t count on it happening any time soon. You could possibly find a statistic to support being a bigot, but it would definitely be bullshit. International crime statistics and legal & sociological analysis directly contradicts racially biased US crime stats, whereas they instead fully confirm this specific gender bias in crime stats. One is true, the others are not. Allowing women to make choices that affect their safety based on verifiable facts is entirely reasonable, I don’t particularly care if men find it discriminatory.
Ok, lets say I prefer only male customer service representatives, front desk receptionists, only male grocery store check out clerks, only male baristas, hairstylists, tattoo artists, auto mechanics, chefs/cooks, restaurant servers, daycare providers, dog walkers, whatever.
Now, I only use businesses where my ‘consumer preference’ is ‘respected’, and there are so many others who have similarly strong preferences to me, that businesses begin to either gender bias their hiring, or offer specific locations that are gender locked, or offer me some kind of filter for non location based / scheduled / on demand enterprises.
Am I being sexist, or am I expressing my consumer preferences?
Are the businesses being sexist, or are they aligning business practices with consumer expectations?
What if femboys, queer men, trans men, well, they’re not men to me, I don’t want to see any of them, so I stop using businesses who hire them, or at least allow me some option to avoid them?
What if I also only want to interact with white, christian men?
Who are 25 to 45 years old?
… How do you draw the lines between ‘businesses reflecting consumer demand’ and ‘the inherent structure of society is bigoted and segregated’?
Why do you draw those lines, which lines do you draw or not draw?
None of those scenarios puts the customer at greater risk of being a victim of a violent or sexual crime, none of them put the employee in question alone with the customer in an unmonitored vehicle, easy line to draw
… A tattoo artist or masseuse could not more easily sexually assault me than a grocery store clerk or dog walker?
What about a therapist vs an accountant, doing in office consults with either?
How about a bus driver or a pilot crew, flight attendants?
I am assuming the line you are trying to draw is something like … being in a confined space, and having less control over your ability to egress.
But you didn’t actually draw that line, so that’s just a guess on my part.
You just made a dubious claim and then used that to justify an undefined rule.
If you’d like to actually try to draw a line, that would be nice.
Tattoo artists do not generally have their customers alone in an unmonitored vehicle with the ability to relocate them easily against their will, neither do masseuses or any of your other examples. Weak comparisons, weak argument.
It is already no problem for you to choose a male tattoo artist, a male hairstylist and a male dogwalker. Whereever you choose a single employee to work closely with you and where you are in a somewhat vulnerable position you can already choose. If for some reason you feel more at ease with male doctors, tattoo artists or hairstylists or massagist, noone is stopping you from only booking with a man.
Whereever you can be in a vulnerable position with an employee it makes sense that you can choose who that person is.
Ok so you also seem to be describing ‘being in a vulnerable position’ as a, or the ‘line’.
Can you define that explicitly, you know, as if it were part of a law?
I will note that tons of people have anxiety/trauma complexes that trigger in public, or in private, with people.of specific sexes, genders, races, expressed religions, etc… so… are all of those things fair game for things that can cause people to feel ‘in a vulnerable position’?
Some people don’t really even have any specific personal trauma, but are just bigotted and some way, and would tell you that… certain people with certain attributes in certain situations make them feel ‘vulnerable’.
I would say basically if the person is working on/with your body or if they have some form of physical power over you which is the case if you are getting in their car (and they could in theory lock you in/drive you somewhere else).
It is e.g. totally fine if a black person would prefer another black person as a hair stylist because they feel they know more about black hair. Same goes for a white person prefering a white hair stylist. At a certain point you should probably ask yourself if you can still participate in society if your demands get too detailed. I would draw the line where the interaction is very unpersonal and takes place in a public setting. Everybody can have a one-minute exchange with any chashier. But as soon as the employee is going to work on your body or put you in a position where you can’t easily leave it’s fair to choose who works with you.
I know a lot of people who have a gender preference when it comes to doctors. Not just gynecologists, but any. I know people who’d only go to a male or female massage therapist. I know asians who’d only go to an asian hairdresser. These are all choices people make every day, we just don’t notice because we don’t filter it through an app.
As for bigotted people, I don’t think you’ll change their mind by forcing them to interact with you. If I was e.g. a hindu driver I might even feel safer knowing that people who hate my religion can choose not to be in my car. The safety concern goes both ways.
Nope, because it’s the male drivers fault the demand is different.
Can you explain that to me, how either collectively, or personally, male drivers are somehow all responsible for their services being valued less, less in demand?
Walk me through it.
I’m a guy, never done uber or lyft before, lets say I’m gonna start tomorrow.
Why and or how is it my fault that I’d be less in-demand as a driver than a woman driver?
Nearly all of the significant number of sexual assaults by Uber drivers have been committed by men. So we, as men, if we become Uber drivers, are statistically significantly more likely to commit sexual assault because we are men.
It’s not personally your fault, but it is the fault of the cohort you’d join, male drivers, who have created the statistical anomaly by doing all those sexual assaults.
So, the actions of a subset are being used to justify discrimination against an entire group, from a business.
It’s not personally my fault, but I am (hypothetically) personally punished.
Uh ok, sounds like a winning discrimination lawsuit to me, if you just admit all that right off the top!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act
The text of the relevant law:
Relevant case:
Uber and Lyft drivers are independent contractors, ie, they are procuring services from Uber and Lyft, the businesses.
They are not employees.
https://chauvellaw.com/post/ca-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-uber-and-lyft-in-ab5-case/
Thus, they, men, are a protected class when acting as independent contractors, and being treated in one way or another by the business they are contracting with.
So, that means, that this is far from a frivolous class action.
https://www.vjamesdesimonelaw.com/dealing-with-discrimination-as-an-independent-contractor/
If you gave the explanation that you just gave me, to a court, in CA… you would lose, and the men bringing the case would win, because you have just plainly admitted you (figuratively, as Uber/Lyft) are doing discrimination.
The alternative sets a precedent that independent contractors cannot be protected from sex based discrimination.
Which uh, would be very problematic, for say uh, strip clubs and modelling, which tend to also actually largely to entirely also be contractor configurations, not full employee configurations.
Or, Uber and Lyft, in CA at least, have to treat everyone who drives for Uber and Lyft, in CA, as actual employees… which would grant them various benefits, but would also allow for the ‘female driver only’ option to still exist in CA.
Theres… no other, more statistically significant profile to sexually assaulting drivers than just ‘they are men’?
There’s no training regimen or qualifying standards, no background check… ?
There’s… no way other to ensure rider safety?
I think you’re missing the simple fact that it’s the passenger who’s choosing. I get to pick my doctor based on sex, my therapist, my massage therapist.
No, you’re missing the entire concept of Civil Rights and Anti Workplace Discrimination laws.
Just replace sex with race, or height, or disability status, or sexual orientation, and you can see how you are making a fool of yourself.
People have to do these jobs. If you just say a class of people can be prevented from doing these jobs, then you don’t believe in employee/worker rights.
And again, no its not just the passenger who is picking.
Its the business that is allowing their contractors to be discriminated against, when it comes to the awarding of micro-contracts, based on their sex alone.
Businesses, and the government, are not allowed to unfairly discriminate based on things that are irrelevant to the contract itself, in how they award contract work. That’s already illegal, in many other contexts.
Its a worker rights issue, not a consumer choice issue.
Uber or Lyft could actually do effective things to weed out bad drivers… effectively cutting half of their drivers payout down by roughly a third… is not a sensible way to do that.
And yes, a man or a woman being your driver is irrelevant. 99.99% of male drivers do not assault their passengers. The chance that a female driver is going to be safer than a male driver is statistically indistinguishable from 0.
Why is it acceptable and legal for me to choose my doctor, therapist, many folks doing a service for me whether as employees or not then?
If I pay for only-fans content, I choose who’s. Why not let people choose their drivers? Why is this e different from the other examples like doctor or adult content?
Fuck it, just add a character creator to the Uber app, and it’ll only match you with drivers that look like your custom character.
Me, a person of culture who loves to create beautiful and T H I C C women when a game allows to: I mean… Yes, but…
butt*
YES!
But that would make sense, and that is not what virtue signalling is about.
And who would use it?
Like 1/100th of the number who use the women-only option?
That’s not the point, though.
I understand and support there being an option for woman-only drivers. It’s unfortunte that it’s required, but women has to deal with a lot of harrasment and I don’t see a reason why not provide a safer option for them. (I’m not implying that creep women exist, or that men don’t have to deal with similar problems, but it’s simply way less common).
I don’t agree with this lawsuit, but adding a men-only option would solve the issue from legal standpoint. You are not giving someone advantage over their gender, both have the same options, and it’s up to the customer/market to decide which one they preffer. The people suing Lyft for providing an option that’s unfortunately required because women have to deal with a lot of creeps can get fucked, and this is the best way how to do it.
If you replace sex with race you’ll realise that you’re completely wrong. There is no legal reason to choose your driver’s gender, just like there is no reason to choose your driver’s race. The fact that some drivers harass women is because Uber and Lyft don’t screen drivers sufficiently to protect passengers.
Hmm, you are right, replacing gender with race does make a good point I didn’t realize. “I want to be able to choose a white driver because I wouldn’t feel safe with a driver of different race” is basically the same point as with gender, but sounds way more wrong and it shows pretty well why is the whole idea a bad one.
At least I’m struggling to find any arguments for the gender version (which is not a bad thing, mind you), if I take this race example into account. You are right that way more rigorous screening of drivers with 0-strike policy would be a lot better than this.
In general this might work for a lot of similar situations, treating gender as a race. I’ll keep that in mind, because it makes sense and I never really though about it that way. Thanks!
But this is not a race issue. This is a gender and sexual one. Dragging race into this is only a convenient excuse to make it something that it’s not, so that you can argue against it by using a false equivalent analogy.
Do we have statistics on any one ethnicity of drivers harassing some other ethnicity of passengers so often to generate upwards of 2,300 lawsuits? I doubt it. The only motivation behind this is the male sexual drive.
Those stats literally exist.
https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-crime-statistics-by-race/
I could easily justify asking for a different race driver to prevent the high same race victimisation rate. Unless I was Asian then I would prefer an Asian driver.
Actually Asian crimes are so low everyone who l should just pick Asian drivers to significantly reduce their risk of being victimised.
Also your framing of this gendered violence as caused by “male sexual drive” is dangerous misandry. Male on female violence is a cultural issue caused by people like you accepting that male sexual violence is an inherent and unavoidable part of being male (i.e. rape culture). In reality it’s exactly like speeding, as long as we treat it as unavoidable and natural it’s going to be prevalent everywhere. Yet many countries have almost eliminated speeding and the pedestrian and cyclists deaths it causes through cultural and structural changes. Same goes for countries that have a fraction of north american rape statistics.
We need to stop accepting sexual violence by anyone against anyone. One of those steps is to actually screen and punish drivers who sexually harass customers. That’s what the 2300 lawsuits are about, ride share companies routinely ignore sexual assault reporting and empower sexual victimization of their clients. The other is to stop accepting that “boys will be boys” includes rape and sexual assault. None of those steps is acting like the only way to stop rape is to hide women from men.
Your logic empowers rapists. The “what was she wearing” defense will soon become the “what was her driver sex preference” defense and lawyers will start arguing that women who don’t select “female driver” are being promiscuous and looking to have sex with a male driver. Why else would they not pick “female driver” after all?
For ride-share drivers? Where? Those are general statistics for the general population. Why are these relevant for a skewed sample of the population? And more importantly, how are those relevant for places like my country, which happens to be a lot more ethnically homogeneous, but that still sees these sexual assaults happening?
Is it, though, if the statistics for sexual crimes based on sex consistently turn up at a 9:1 ratio for males vs females? That’s a whole magnitude of difference that you can’t ignore. And this is the Mexican government putting out these statistics for cases of sexual assault and rape at a national level. The ones I’ve seen for the US are very similar.
And yet the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male. Have I been groped by women? Yes. Can I be raped by a woman? Of course. But the fact of the matter is that I’m way more likely to be a victim of sexual assault by other men, and I have been multiple times throughout the years. You can’t deny this is the overall trend in every society that has ever existed.
The fact of the matter is that male sexual violence is a part of many species’ biology, including our own. Do you really think that rape is not a viable reproductive strategy in several species? It’s time to face reality, and that’s not necessarily mysandrist despite all this pearl-clutching. If men didn’t do it disproportionately, we wouldn’t be having this exchange. Simple as that.
Only if you frame it under the tired adage of “boys will be boys” as if I’m the one saying that. That’s all you. My POV is based on academic publishing that I’ve read throughout the years.
And your solution is?
They used to have similar studies to show that black people had lower IQ.
Sexual assault is a crime. Criminals commit crimes. This isn’t supposed to be a “Men against Women” thing. It’s criminals vs. victims. Of course men will commit more VIOLENT crimes like SA than women, men have a biological strength advantage which really helps commit violent crimes. I don’t deny biology.
But if we act like it’s more than that, that men are inherently going to sexually assault women and there is nothing we can do about it other than hide women, we’re accepting that sexual assault as an unavoidable part of everyday life instead of treating it like the unacceptable crime it is.
No, because you’re imagining that that’s what the report said based on what you want to think and are drawing historical connections to a situation that is only superficially similar.
And yet it keeps happening at a disproportionate rate. It seems to me that you say you don’t want to deny the biology, but don’t hesitate to deny the behavior.
Mind you, I’m not saying that all men are rapists because I’m also a man and I know that’s not true. I’m saying the great majority of sexual assaulters are men, so let’s address that by giving people who are hesitant a choice. I think we can both agree on that, no?