this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So this feature is matching with someone of the same gender only. That's the impression this gives. So women with women, nonbinary to nonbinary. Ok. Why are men cut off if that's the case? How many more lines of code could it possibly be to just implement it for everyone instead of specifically choosing to exclude people? It would be the exact same PR if it was made available to everyone. There's zero reason this couldn't just be implemented universally. In terms of this making things safer or more comfortable, couldn't someone that is a slimeball just lie? The article says you have to choose your gender. What is actually stopping someone from misusing this?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Akagigahara 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's probably due to the saturation of how many male drivers Lyft has. It reports that only 23% are female. While it doesn't say how many non-binary drivers there are, I doubt they make up more than a few percent. That puts men at ~75% driver share. So the chance of a a female rider, which according to Lyft are about half of their riders, being paired with is vastly smaller than a male rider getting a man.

0.5*0.75=0.375 chance for a man to get a male driver.

0.5*0.23=0.115 chance for a women to get a female driver.

While yes, you can abuse the system, you have to make a more conscious effort about being a "slimeball". This isn't necessarily a feature to prevent SH and SA, but more to make drivers and riders more comfortable.

Oh, and about the amount of code: it would be less code, as you do not need to filter and can just start a match-search.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your calculations don't hold up. If you get a driver from a 25/75 pool, you are 25 or 75 percent likely to get that gender as your driver, no matter your own gender. So this 0.5 times is not needed.

[–] Akagigahara 2 points 1 year ago

You seem to have misinterpreted what I was calculating.

The 0.5 is the gender of the user, which is important to calculate whether a user gets their own gender as a driver or not.