But civil rights lawyers said it would be difficult for such car service to win a discrimination lawsuit.
“Companies that provide a service need to accept potential customers without discriminating,” said Dahlia C. Rudavsky, is a partner in the Boston firm of Messing, Rudavsky & Weliky.
“There’s nothing wrong with advertising particularly to a female customer base,” Rudavsky said. “But if a company goes further and refuses to pick up a man, I think they’d potentially run into legal trouble.
Refusing to hire men as drivers could be an even clearer legal problem, said Sulman.
“To limit employees to one gender, you have to have what the law calls a bona fide occupational qualification. And that’s a really strict standard,” he said. “The law’s really tough on that. For gender, it’s not enough to say, ‘we really just want to have a female here because our customers prefer that to feel safer.’ ”
