When Bridget Dominic moved back to her parents' home in Brisbane recently after a stint working in advertising in Sydney, she decided to become an Uber driver to earn some extra cash.
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It's the perfect job for a student like her, she says. Except for one thing. People won't stop telling her that she shouldn't be doing it.
"I thought it was a really good way to make money while I was living at home, thought it would be really fun. I didn't really think that I should be worried for my safety. And then once I started driving, every single passenger told me that I should be worried."
Dominic says she gets grief on this topic from around three-quarters of her passengers. Most men tell her they wouldn't let their partner or daughter do it, while the women who comment appear dazzled by her courage.
One male passenger even questioned flat out why she wasn't afraid of being raped, she says. "Which is a really inappropriate thing to say to someone's face."
Despite all this, Dominic says she loves the work. She loves the flexibility and the opportunity it has given her to meet people outside her usual advertising and media "bubble". Although she doesn't always see eye to eye with her passengers, she says apart from a couple of moments, she mostly feels safe. And she insists it is a great job for women – or at least, it should be, given women are statistically safer drivers and tend to have good social skills, knowing how to make others feel comfortable.
But the constant questioning does make Dominic feel singled out, like she doesn't belong behind the wheel of an Uber car and that working as a driver means abuse is "inevitable". Worse, she says if something did happen to her on the job, she thinks others would see it as her fault.
Then there's the sexist and racist comments from passengers she finds herself putting up with through gritted teeth, because she doesn't want to end up in an altercation.
A recent incident prompted her to post a lengthy message to Facebook. In it, she pointed out that the worst offenders in her experience are not "faceless monsters" but entitled young men. And she had a request for those who might feel compelled to question a female driver about the risks they assume she's taking.
"All I ask is that the next time you meet a female driver (or security guard, or soldier, or police officer) instead of asking them where they found the courage to participate in such an unsafe profession, find the courage in yourself to have a frank conversation with the men in your life about the way they treat women," she wrote.
The concern many feel about the potential for sexual assault and harassment in taxis and ride-share vehicles has spurred a new app, Shebah, which is exclusively for female drivers and women (and kids of both sexes) passengers.
Although Dominic says she'll consider signing up to the service (in addition to Uber) when it launches this month, she doesn't think it's the answer for women who want to work as drivers. She'd rather see existing ride-share companies make more of an effort to document instances of sexist (and racist) behaviour and stamp it out.
"It's not really my approach to kind of isolate myself," she says. "I think it's just circumnavigating the problem, not fixing it; if we are just putting women in their own cars, and their own train carriages, and staying inside at night."
Uber did not return requests for comment.
smh.com.au
