Some women prefer female taxi drivers. Why the outrage over Lady Drive Her?
Halifax resident who started company to meet demand getting pushback from her male peers
This month, Crissy McDow, a resident of Halifax and an airport limo driver of more than 20 years, did something that made a lot of men in her industry mad. She started her own company. More specifically, McDow founded Lady Drive Her, an airport car service comprised of an all-female driving roster: 12 women with decades of experience schlepping people to and from the Halifax Stanfield International Airport.
McDow didn’t found a woman-driven company with a feminist agenda in mind. She founded the company because it seemed like a smart business idea. As McDow told me on the phone recently, “Over the past 20 years, I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries from the public asking for female drivers.”
Among those inquiring were businesswomen flying into Halifax late at night, and parents of international students studying in Halifax, who preferred that a strange woman drive their daughters to campus as opposed to a strange man.
“I never asked them why,” McDow said. “I just tried to do it myself.”
Now, she and the 12 like-minded women are doing it together. Lady Drive Her’s website went live this weekend. Already, McDow reports, the company is averaging about three calls a day.
Some of McDow’s male peers in the industry, however, seem to think that three calls a day is three calls too many.
When McDow gave CBC news an interview recently outside the airport, a group of male limo drivers responded with charges of reverse sexism. A driver named Lucien Jebailey told CBC that Lady Drive Her “might be sending the wrong message to the consumer, saying it’s OK to be afraid of male drivers.”
McDow says that while some male drivers she knows are supportive of her new company, others have stopped speaking to her.
“There’s 200 licensed drivers at the airport and we’re only 12 of them, so how we can threaten them, I don’t know,” she says. “I’m not kowtowing to their sensitive side anymore. Business is business.”
McDow’s male critics aren’t just oversensitive — they’re misguided.
There are other reasons, besides a fear of physical harm, that a woman might prefer a female driver to a male one, a lot of them counterintuitive.
One is an aversion to prying small talk. It’s not uncommon for male cab and Uber drivers to ask women passengers one or more of the following questions: “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Are you married?” “Going somewhere special?” (If you’re dressed up.) “Sisters?” (If you’re with another woman.)
Women, despite their gender’s reputation for chattiness, tend not to ask strangers these questions out of the blue. They’re also statistically less likely to drive drunk or speed. And they’re more willing to take direction, according to some studies (some stereotypes are true). This is a plus if you have a special route you’d like to take that differs from the co-ordinates listed on the driver’s GPS.
But what about the physical harm rationale, the rape and/or murder spectre that many male drivers servicing the Halifax airport found insulting?
Sure, it’s highly unlikely that your cab driver will stuff you into the back of his trunk — but it is possible, though rare, and more possible when passengers are female and drivers are male. That possibility creates the real issue — anxiety. An all-female driving service seems an easy, practical remedy to assuage the fears many women have of travelling on their own.
This is why the opposition to services like Lady Drive Her (which are now popping up worldwide) seems so baffling.
Typically, men who are contemptuous of feminism wish that women would take so-called “practical measures” to prevent assault, such as “being aware” of our surroundings and wearing modest clothing (the latter a tactic proven to be both irrelevant and ineffective). But a female-operated driving service is a measure as practical as they come. McDow’s website makes no mention of rape culture, male privilege or feminist ideology. Lady Drive Her isn’t a protest; it’s an apolitical, concrete option to let some women feel safe and, bottom line, stay safe. (Male passengers, by the way, are more than welcome to use the service).
So why the pushback? Why the fuss?
It appears as though any measure calculated to keep women safe from dangerous men is destined to be perceived, by a certain male contingent, as either inflammatory or at least annoying.
For this contingent, the only acceptable way to think about and talk about men who hurt women is to regard these men not as people who can be changed, avoided or combatted by rethinking the structures of our society, but as an unfortunate, unforeseeable fact of life — like an earthquake or an aneurysm; an aberration you can’t prevent, so you might as well just put it out of your mind.
Trust me, we would if we could. But we can’t.
So for a little peace, some of us prefer a woman behind the wheel. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.