Female customers who may be sick of male cab drivers asking them if they have a boyfriend may be happy to hear about a new on-demand car service to launch its services in New York City next week.
SheRides is all geared up to offer exclusive-for-women taxi rides for all females needing a ride in the Big Apple on Sept. 16. Also to launch on the same day is a similar app with a different name, SheTaxis, which will debut in neighboring Westchester County and Long Island.
SheRides is the brainchild of New Yorker Stella Mateo, a mother of two girls and wife of Fernando Mateo, the founder of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, a trade group that represents more than 30,000 for-hire car drivers, including livery service drivers and cab drivers.
Mateo hopes to encourage women for-hire drivers, who currently make up only 9 percent of the 60,000 drivers in New York City, to join the largely male-dominated industry, and provide women-only services for passengers who are not comfortable being chauffeured by male strangers.
Women can hire a car using the SheRides app, which will only be available for iOS initially until the company's developers smooth out an Android app they are currently working on. The app will then ask the user if there's a woman in the riding party. If yes, a SheRides driver wearing a hot pink pashmina scarf zooms right over to pick up her passengers. If not, the app directs the user to other car-for-hire services.
"Perfect idea," 51-year-old Gretchen Britt says in an interview with the New York Times, which first reported about the new service. "You feel safer and more comfortable with a woman."
22-year-old Gibson Pierrelouis also likes the idea of a car service for women only, saying that it would be a good idea to have his six sisters hire a SheRides taxi instead of having a male driver transport them around the city.
However, the SheRides service is likely bound to get in trouble with state and federal anti-discrimination laws, which state that no company may discriminate against a job applicant on the basis of his or her sex. New York state laws also prohibit car-for-hire services, which are deemed places of public accommodation, from refusing to provide service to a customer based on sex.
"I think it's got problems," says Samuel Estreicher, law professor and employment discrimination expert at New York University. "Employers cannot assume all males will be violent sex offenders."
Sylvia A. Law, a sex discrimination scholar at the same university, agrees with Estreicher, saying that SheRides could have to face the law when it comes to its hiring policies. However, Law says a taxi service that serves only women passengers is not likely to come in trouble with the law and compares the service to female-only floors offered in some hotels.
"Cultural norms against gender discrimination in public accommodations are not as strong as the cultural norm against racial discrimination," Law says.
