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?
Doctors and therapists tend not to be contractors, they tend to be employees.
Totally different legal situation.
Which you appear to have glossed over, or just don’t care about.
Businesses tend to only function at all within a legal framework, so its kind of important.
Anyway, OnlyFans is not Uber.
Uber would be like that if you could actually examine people’s individual profiles, like Tinder, or maybe like AngiesList, an app where local freelance contractors post their whole work related profile for you to try to pick the best person for the job.
But Uber doesn’t do that.
Because there’s no reason for it to.
Unlike with OnlyFans… UberDriver’s looks don’t matter. Unlike with AngiesList… UberDriver’s work history and experience with HVAC or plumbing or whatever doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that they have a car, a liscense, and they can drive you to your destination, and their previous passengers rated them well, or at least did not rate them poorly, if they’re fairly new.
(Anytime an UberDriver pulls some dumbass shit with a passenger? Gets in a car accident, their fault or not? Loses their liscense? Basically instantly shitcanned and banned for life from working with Uber.)
(Oh and they all have cameras, because all potential incidents must be reviewable, both for the safety of the passenger, and the driver. You apparently have no idea how common it is for uber passengers to assault their drivers, try to rob them, do ridiculous/dangerous shit in the car, refuse to leave the vehicle at ride termination, get bait called into a grand theft auto carjacking, etc. Its way, waaaay more common than unprovoked violence from drivers toward passengers)
Uber has an algo that assigns the nearest available driver who meets your passenger and distance requirements and it does this by sending out micro contracts out to their nearby active driver pool, and somebody accepts it first.
You as a consumer of an Uber drive… don’t have any say at all in who your driver is going to be, you know nothing about them, not when you request the ride.
All this new thing does is not send out those requests to men.
That’s not you picking out your favorite specific contractor based on careful consideration, that’s you just blanket ignoring half the driver pool because of the genes they were born with.
(And I guesss, with current state of the US, well fuck trans people I guess, who knows what their legal sex or sex in Uber is, at this point)
Do you wanna turn Uber into Tinder, for drives?
Swipe through available driver profiles, get a sense of who they are first?
Here’s what’ll happen:
The vast majority of men will rarely get any matches when a woman has to match first.
So, that means women drivers have no problem getting male or female passengers, men drivers have no problem getting male passengers, but only a small amount of male drivers will get female passengers.
So… now half the rider population is unaccessible to half the driver population.
Beyond that, pretty people with nicer cars, or… whatever kind of more attractive profile, they will get all the requests, become parasocial micro celebs, and they’ll be too busy to meet all demand, so, you’ll either be picky, matching with a few busy people, and your rides will not be timely, or, you’ll scattershot, and basically always be demeaning to or disappointed by your non 10/10 drivers, even though they’re timely and do their job well.
You seriously want to dating app-ify a taxi app?
Its like the literal perfect opposite of how to efficiently solve the logistical problem of ‘get passenger from A to B in shortest amount of time’.
Its essentially the most perfectly inefficient system conceivable, for rapidly solving dynamic route planning with a random number and location of drivers, passengers, pickups, destinations.
Next, what happens is male drivers will leave Uber/Lyft, and start a male drivers only app, purely out of spite, because now, they have basically a quarter to a half of their potential contracts as they did before.
Its not like its that technically difficult to make the actual software that is the Uber/Lyft app.
They’ll just have to start it in one particularly dense urban area with enough likeminded guys, and it would grow from there, hell maybe do the digital equivalent of a franchise model and just have other cities/regions handled by local maintainers, a layered and variable system of pricing and cost sharing and specifically handling local physical conditions, legal environments. Hell it could even form local unions/chapters.
So… with everything you’ve said so far, you should be 100% fine with a male only drivers app.
The… reason why this doesn’t already exist, is because if you said you were going to make a men only drivers app, most people would say that that’s a clearly illegal business model that discriminates against women on the basis of only their sex.
I guess we will see if CA somehow decides that effective, but not strictly formal sexual discrimination against contract workers, in only one direction, is legal.
There is nothing wrong with letting riders choose. Clearly you don’t know any survivors or sexual assault. It’s not just about the likelhood of something happening. It’s about the rider feeling comfortable.
I am fine with simply letting riders choose male / female. Just like with with a doctor. Just like with a massage therapist.
Anyway, laws and the actual structure by which things operate don’t seem to matter to you at all, so, whatever I guess.
If you can justify punishing a mass group of 99% innocent people so that you can irrationally feel more safe than you actually are, that’s no different than doing the same thing by race or any other inherent unchangeable element of someone.
Everything to you is customer service, that’s how you get a world of abused employees who have no rights.
You not be being able to do statistics properly is not a legitimate reason to be bigoted against an entire class of people.
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?
Doctors and therapists tend not to be contractors, they tend to be employees.
Totally different legal situation.
Which you appear to have glossed over, or just don’t care about.
Businesses tend to only function at all within a legal framework, so its kind of important.
Anyway, OnlyFans is not Uber.
Uber would be like that if you could actually examine people’s individual profiles, like Tinder, or maybe like AngiesList, an app where local freelance contractors post their whole work related profile for you to try to pick the best person for the job.
But Uber doesn’t do that.
Because there’s no reason for it to.
Unlike with OnlyFans… UberDriver’s looks don’t matter. Unlike with AngiesList… UberDriver’s work history and experience with HVAC or plumbing or whatever doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that they have a car, a liscense, and they can drive you to your destination, and their previous passengers rated them well, or at least did not rate them poorly, if they’re fairly new.
(Anytime an UberDriver pulls some dumbass shit with a passenger? Gets in a car accident, their fault or not? Loses their liscense? Basically instantly shitcanned and banned for life from working with Uber.)
(Oh and they all have cameras, because all potential incidents must be reviewable, both for the safety of the passenger, and the driver. You apparently have no idea how common it is for uber passengers to assault their drivers, try to rob them, do ridiculous/dangerous shit in the car, refuse to leave the vehicle at ride termination, get bait called into a grand theft auto carjacking, etc. Its way, waaaay more common than unprovoked violence from drivers toward passengers)
Uber has an algo that assigns the nearest available driver who meets your passenger and distance requirements and it does this by sending out micro contracts out to their nearby active driver pool, and somebody accepts it first.
You as a consumer of an Uber drive… don’t have any say at all in who your driver is going to be, you know nothing about them, not when you request the ride.
All this new thing does is not send out those requests to men.
That’s not you picking out your favorite specific contractor based on careful consideration, that’s you just blanket ignoring half the driver pool because of the genes they were born with.
(And I guesss, with current state of the US, well fuck trans people I guess, who knows what their legal sex or sex in Uber is, at this point)
Do you wanna turn Uber into Tinder, for drives?
Swipe through available driver profiles, get a sense of who they are first?
Here’s what’ll happen:
The vast majority of men will rarely get any matches when a woman has to match first.
So, that means women drivers have no problem getting male or female passengers, men drivers have no problem getting male passengers, but only a small amount of male drivers will get female passengers.
So… now half the rider population is unaccessible to half the driver population.
Beyond that, pretty people with nicer cars, or… whatever kind of more attractive profile, they will get all the requests, become parasocial micro celebs, and they’ll be too busy to meet all demand, so, you’ll either be picky, matching with a few busy people, and your rides will not be timely, or, you’ll scattershot, and basically always be demeaning to or disappointed by your non 10/10 drivers, even though they’re timely and do their job well.
You seriously want to dating app-ify a taxi app?
Its like the literal perfect opposite of how to efficiently solve the logistical problem of ‘get passenger from A to B in shortest amount of time’.
Its essentially the most perfectly inefficient system conceivable, for rapidly solving dynamic route planning with a random number and location of drivers, passengers, pickups, destinations.
Next, what happens is male drivers will leave Uber/Lyft, and start a male drivers only app, purely out of spite, because now, they have basically a quarter to a half of their potential contracts as they did before.
Its not like its that technically difficult to make the actual software that is the Uber/Lyft app.
They’ll just have to start it in one particularly dense urban area with enough likeminded guys, and it would grow from there, hell maybe do the digital equivalent of a franchise model and just have other cities/regions handled by local maintainers, a layered and variable system of pricing and cost sharing and specifically handling local physical conditions, legal environments. Hell it could even form local unions/chapters.
So… with everything you’ve said so far, you should be 100% fine with a male only drivers app.
The… reason why this doesn’t already exist, is because if you said you were going to make a men only drivers app, most people would say that that’s a clearly illegal business model that discriminates against women on the basis of only their sex.
I guess we will see if CA somehow decides that effective, but not strictly formal sexual discrimination against contract workers, in only one direction, is legal.
There is nothing wrong with letting riders choose. Clearly you don’t know any survivors or sexual assault. It’s not just about the likelhood of something happening. It’s about the rider feeling comfortable.
I am fine with simply letting riders choose male / female. Just like with with a doctor. Just like with a massage therapist.
I am a survivor of sexual assault.
Anyway, laws and the actual structure by which things operate don’t seem to matter to you at all, so, whatever I guess.
If you can justify punishing a mass group of 99% innocent people so that you can irrationally feel more safe than you actually are, that’s no different than doing the same thing by race or any other inherent unchangeable element of someone.
Everything to you is customer service, that’s how you get a world of abused employees who have no rights.
You not be being able to do statistics properly is not a legitimate reason to be bigoted against an entire class of people.