No.

Women are not victimizing men when they consider their own safety in public. As many have said, it is not an ideal situation we have where men think it is okay to sexually assault women under any circumstances. I see the parallels you are trying to draw here — they are not valid, because men DO victimize women all the time. This is not some made-up paranoia feeding into “reverse sexism” against men. This is real, and I think men often have a hard time wrapping their head around that, because they don’t deal with it on a daily basis.

Sure women can be violent, but a) I can physically hold my own against most women, but not with most men and b) let’s be honest here. Most of the violence against women is from men. Not all men are violent jerkwads and there ARE some women who are violent, but statistically, it’s men women have to worry about.

Women live their daily lives constatly being told they are in danger. A lot of it is BS that the media tells us (fear is a great way to sell something), and even though we know that it’s really wearing on the nerves. If I could take a woman-driven taxi and feel like I could have five minutes to myself where I didn’t have to have my pepper spray in my hand, I’d take it.

I don’t understand the logic used by some of the commenters above. It seems like they are using the logic of, “Male cab drivers have attacked/harassed me/someone I know. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to deal with male cab drivers?” If evidence of violence from female cab drivers were exposed, then would they say that women shouldn’t even use cabs; that women shouldn’t drive cabs; that it was some anomalous situation? Or is it just convenient for some of the above commenters to appear to paint all men (not just male cab drivers) as “violent” and wanting to harass women? (I am taking as evidence the dearth of comments saying that not all men are bad that the commenters above feel that it’s okay to discriminate against half of the population.)

The other problem I have with the idea, and one that is illustrated by the many comments by women stating that they would feel safe in one of these cabs, is the assumption that women cab drivers are inherently not violent or dangerous. This is simply not true, an yet the dichotomy persists: Men = bad, Women = good.

… as a side note, at least while I was living in the UK, the reason for the elitism among the London cab drivers was because of the supposedly very difficult set of mental navigation ability that London cab drivers were supposed to be able to show when getting licensed. Mostly only native Londoners were able to make the grade. There were even some neural psychology papers written about neural pathway development (or somesuch) among London cab drivers that was published while I was doing my undergraduate in the UK. I don’t know if that is the still the reason for keeping it an “elite profession”, what with GPS-enabled navigation systems.

What you describe is one behavior pattern that you generalize to all other cab drivers; something that didn’t happen after you had a man with you. How do you know that your one “taken for a ride” driver wouldn’t take the opportunity with any group – given the opportunity (using different excuses and justifications)? How do you know that it was because you had a man with you that you were not subsequently “taken for a ride”? (i.e., How do you know that the other cab drivers weren’t forced to act honestly due to the presence of a male driver? You don’t. You can’t.)

Could you also have said, “Having to worry about Blacks/Mexicans/Asians in one less place (the ride home) seems helpful to me,” and claim that you aren’t being discriminative?

Apparently, discrimination is okay here. It’s like you say “it’s dependent on context.”

See… this is where double-standards come in. It is, on the one hand, important to have individuals accountable for their actions and also bad to stereotype a group of people and then act on that stereotype. It is, on the other hand, important to act to preserve your own safety. When these two things come into conflict, many people raise their voices on the side of safety, and I understand that. However, it occasionally appears that the safety concerns are knee-jerk reactions of moving to a situation of segregation or opposition.

What about looking at other measures, such as a ranking system for taxi drivers, like the 5-star system that Ebay uses for its sellers? Why not have men-only cars in trains for those men that don’t want to face women or a temptation of doing something stupid in front of a woman (this is in addition to women-only cars)? Why not require that taxi companies hire equal ratios of men and women as drivers across all shifts?

In the end, I am asking why segregation of the sexes is considered a good option in this context when it is not considered good in other contexts. And if do you consider it good in this context, then what about the implicit discrimination against men who don’t assault or harass women and don’t condone such action, either?