Hailing a cab is hard in New York City. Some available drivers will see you trying to wave them down, but once they see your complexion, they get busy. Or they speed off. Or they simply don’t stop.
So upon the invent of rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, minorities took a huge sigh of release. They figured that they would not be discriminated against with this more fair system of travel. They were wrong.
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According to NBCNews, studies have revealed that both companies have a “history of bias against minority passengers” before accepting the rides. These studies also reveal that Black passengers have to wait way longer for their scheduled pick-ups and have experienced way more cancellations than white passengers.
There has been an answer to this.
“By removing the ability to see information before the drivers accepted a ride request, the hope was that all of the bias we were observing would cease to exist,” Chris Parker, an assistant professor of information technology and analytics at American University and the co-author of the study, “When Transparency Fails: Bias and Financial Incentives in Ride-sharing Platforms,” told NBC News. “But after the change was instituted, we suspected that there’s still the problem of some drivers not wanting to pick up certain passengers.”
So Parker and his co-author Jorge Meija, an assistant professor of operations and decisions technologies at Indiana Univesity, tested them jokers. They multiple profiles on Uber and Lyft. He gave each passenger 4.8 in a rating (out of a max of 5), but posted different ethnic names like Keisha, Latoya, Rasheed or Jamal and some with traditionally white names like Brad, Greg, Emily or Allison. Also added Black and white faces to the stereotypically to the names. Their findings according to NBCNews is
Over 90 percent of people perceive Emily, Allison, Brad and Greg as Caucasian names and Keisha, Latoya, Rasheed and Jamal to be Black names, according to a 2004 study, which is why the researchers used these names.”
Now… some of the things we have been thinking are now being revealed as true.
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