Uber Can't Fix Rape Culture

I wrote a Daily Dot piece about Uber, rape culture, and what the service can and can’t do to prevent sexual assault.

On Wednesday, ubiquitous ridesharing app Uber announced a partnership with UN Women, promising to create a million jobs for women by the year 2020. Currently, 14 percent of Uber’s 150,000 drivers are women, double the percentage of female cab drivers.

Although there’s much to praise about the new initiative, which could help womenworldwide achieve financial independence, some wonder if this bold move is a response to mounting criticisms of Uber’s handling of sexual violence.

In one terrifying incident in India, a male Uber driver allegedly kidnapped and raped a female passenger. In response, Uber apologized and promised to look into options to make its service safer. It also introduced a “panic button” feature that allows riders to alert the police and a few selected friends or family members of their location.

This feature seems like it could go a long way to increasing both actual safety and feelings of safety, but it is only available to riders, not drivers, and—for some reason—only in India. Uber did not provide any explanation for this, suggesting that the company either views the alleged rape as an isolated incident or one unique to India specifically.

But as we know, rape with and without the aid of Uber is all too common all over the world, including within the United States. In the past year, Uber drivers have allegedly assaulted riders in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Orlando, and Washington, DC. In response, a website called Who’s Driving You?, which appears to take a strong stance against ride-sharing services, was formed to document these incidents.

While these assaults may make seem like drivers hold all the power over riders, male riders have found ways to harass and abuse female Uber drivers, too. One of those ways involves exploiting the fact that Uber allows riders to call drivers using an anonymized phone number.

Read the rest here.

Uber Can't Fix Rape Culture
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Correlation is Not Causation: STI Edition

I wrote a piece for the Daily Dot about a new study on STI rates among men who hook up with men using smartphone apps, and how easy it is to misinterpret the results.

new study by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center and UCLA suggests that men who have sex with men and use hookup apps like Grindr are significantly more likely to have gonorrhea and chlamydia than men who have sex with men but do not use such apps. But before you panic and delete Grindr from your phone lest it give you an STI, let’s look at what the study does and does not actually show.

[…]Careless headline writers frequently mix up correlation and causation, spreading misinformation and stigma. Despite Lowder’s balanced take on the study, the headline of his own piece reads, rather alarmingly, “Study Suggests Grindr-Like Apps Increase Likelihood of Sexually Transmitted Infections.” This wording implies that using such apps increases an individual’s likelihood of contracting an STI, not that, in general, people who use such apps are also more likely to have an STI. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one.

Another important distinction is whether the participants contracted the STIs during the course of the study (while using GSN apps) or just happened to have them at the time that the data was collected. Here Lowder’s article is also unclear: “Specifically, geo-social app users were 25 percent more likely than their bar hopping comrades to contract gonorrhea, and 37 percent more likely to have picked up chlamydia.” And an article about the study at Advocate is headlined, “STUDY: Smartphone Hookup App Users More Likely To Contract Sexually Transmitted Infections.”

However, the actual study notes that the participants were tested for STIs at the same time as they were asked about their sexual behavior, including the use of GSN apps. This means that they did not necessarily contract the STIs while using the GSN apps, or after having used them. The infections could have preceded the participants’ use of the apps.

This is important because it can help untangle the question of why this correlation exists, besides the obvious hypothesis that using GSN apps can actually cause people to contract STIs at higher rates than other ways of meeting sexual partners. Perhaps people who already have STIs are more interested in using the apps because of the anonymity—it’s much less scary to tell a random person you’ll never meet again that you have an STI and need to use a condom than it is to tell someone who’s embedded in your social network. Or, on the more cynical side of things, people might feel less guilty about not disclosing an STI to a random app hookup than someone they’ve met in a more conventional way.

Or, maybe people who are attracted to “wild” and “risky” sexual situations are more likely to have STIs and more likely to use GSN apps. The common factor could be impulsivity or recklessness.

Read the rest here.

Correlation is Not Causation: STI Edition