Lyft is introducing a new feature that lets women and non-binary riders choose a preference to match with drivers of the same gender.
The ride-hailing company said it was a “highly requested feature” in a blog post Tuesday, saying the new feature allows women and non-binary people to “feel that much more confident” in using Lyft and also hopefully encourage more women to sign up to be drivers to access its “flexible earning opportunities.”
The service, called “Women+ Connect,” is rolling out in the coming months. Riders can turn on the option in the Lyft app, however the company warns that it’s not a guarantee that they’ll be matched with a women or non-binary person if one of those people aren’t nearby. Both the riders and drivers will need to opt-in to the feature for it work and riders must chose a gender for it to work.
I doubt exclusion of men from this feature has anything to do with it being more work to add men. Hell, it’s actually LESS work to enable it for everyone than it is to add exclusions. Excluding men was a business decision, I’m sure.
Now, I’m in the privileged position of being male, so take this with a grain of salt, but I entirely disagree with the blatant sexism of this feature. I get the purpose, but it feels horribly misguided. Can women not commit violent or sexual crimes? Can nonbinary people not commit violent or sexual crimes? Only men can apparently commit these crimes, according to the people who thought this feature up. Sexual crimes by women, for example, go wildly underreported…Even if they were using statistics to justify how they implemented this feature, they didn’t do their homework.
I mean based on how the exclusion works it’s more about who they want to protect, not who they think will commit crimes. The guy in the previous post said it only does same gender matching when the feature is used, so the only reason there isn’t a male driver option is because there’s no feature for male passengers. (because it’s same gender only)
And you’re saying they didn’t do their homework…while also saying they go unreported, so there wouldn’t be much to research to begin with…
You’re missing the point. Obviously anyone is capable of commiting these crimes, but men overwhelmingly commit them to women than any other circumstance, and they’re almost always much more violent than the inverse. Shit, my friend showed me a TikTok the other day about a woman who rejected a man, then slapped him when he wouldn’t take no for an answer. You know what he did in response? He hit her in the head with a fucking brick.
Instead of instantly going to “this is sexist”, maybe stop and think why it’s even being considered in the first place.
Oh well if you saw it in a tiktok that was totally probably not at all fake, it must be true.
“men overwhelmingly commit them to women than any other circumstance” Go ahead and give me a source for that.