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.
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?
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.
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.