Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>I think the direction we should go in is not to separate genders, but unify them. For example, there shouldn't be separate bathrooms

This Uber gender option is about safety for women.

Some women are afraid of male Uber drivers stalking them and learning of their home address. To avoid that, they have to follow "best practice" hacks such as entering a decoy address of a nearby intersection for pickup and dropoff. This makes it more inconvenient but a little harder for Uber drivers to figure out exactly where they live.

Allowing for "female-only" drivers may help passengers avoid the cloak-and-dagger workarounds.

View on HN

> This Uber gender segregation is about safety for women.

It's always about "safety for women". Or so they say. The argument for disallowing trans women in female bathrooms is also "safety for women". Complete bullshit. Similar argument with end-to-end encryption and safety for children.

However, often times these separations make society more unequal und unsafer for women.

It's a sad world if you think this to it's conclusion: Should females only ride with female taxi drivers? What about trains? Should we have separate train cars for females? Should we disallow females going out on the street alone without a male companion because they might get raped? It's about the safety for women, after all.

No, let's not start down this road. Are there men that harass and rape women? Of course! Will it happen a bit less if there's separation? Maybe. But it has many second-order effects that are not desirable.

Instead, as others have said, we need to think as a society why men are harassing women in the first place, and what we can attack this problem at the root.

You keep confusing "giving women the option to X" with "forcing women to X".

> It's always about "safety for women" ... Complete bullshit.

It's not bullshit. What underhand motivation do you think is at work here? Uber famously had a terrible track record on sexual assault (overwhelmingly by men against women), but through policies like this have gradually been working it down.

> Should we have separate train cars for females?

It's not a terrible idea. From talking to women, there is a lot of fear of getting on trains alone at night. If they felt safer about it then it could be a net positive both for public safety and the economy. It has actually been floated in UK politics recently: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/women-only-train-carr...

I am not saying Uber is doing this with some underhand motivation. Not blaming Uber here. My point is broader one. That the more separation (even if optional) we introduce, the worse its impact on gender equality. What we should do is try to tackle the root causes.

What do you think Uber could do to tackle the root causes? What would you say are the root causes?

I don't work at Uber, so I don't know what they are doing. But what some things Uber could do, just off of the top of my head:

- Take complaints more seriously

- When selecting drivers, have a more rigourous selection procedure regarding this topic

What we as society can do? Many things, but let me list some that just spring to mind:

- Stop objectifying women in ads, movies, porn, popular culture and other places

- Stop treating nudity as some kind of crazy thing (of both genders, but again, double standards here because male topless nudity is not a big deal, but female is)

- Providing more suport for women who have been stalked or harassed or raped by men (ideally, so that we can pre-emptively stop those activities, not after it's too late)

- Education: Include gender education early on in school, mixed gender sports classes, mixed bathrooms, etc.

It's a great list. I believe Uber has improved on both of those items although could still do better (see e.g. [0]).

The issue with the second list is that it takes a long time to encourage that sort of social progress. It's extremely difficult to undo years of conditioning, so I think we have to wait it out until that generation ages out. In the meantime providing safety options for women in limited high-risk scenarios feels very jutifiable. And we continually reassess what those scenarios are so that we're allocating those measures in an efficient and moderated way.

[0] https://helpingsurvivors.org/rideshare-sexual-assault/how-ar...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com