Who's going to drive? A fleet of brand-new taxi cabs with seats still covered in plastic. (Photo : blog.chinatraveldepot.com)
The number of female drivers in China just keeps on increasing, and such is good since it helps break gender stereotypes, said Professor Luo Huilan of China Women’s University.
One typical and broad explanation concerning gender stereotypes is they are generalizations people have for particular individuals.
In this case, many are saying men are better drivers than women because driving is basically a man’s thing. Now that is gender stereotyping.
The Ministry of Public Security said that the number of registered drivers already exceeded 300 million at the time it presented this piece of information on its website on Nov. 27, 2014. The ministry said that 60.59 million of that were women. Back in 2004, there were merely 3 million.
American John Pasden, founder of Shanghai-based language consultancy and tutorial center AllSet Learning, once hailed a taxi in Shanghai in 2005 where the driver was a middle-aged woman and blogged about his experience.
Pasden said that he was initially hesitant whether to address the female taxi driver as “shifu” since he got “a very male feeling” from this Chinese term that translates to “master” in English.
When he asked the driver about it, she simply said, “Sure. Why not?”
He continued the conversation by throwing another question: “As a woman taxi driver, what challenges or difficulties do you face on the job?” Inside his head he already thought of possible answers, such as getting “ribbed or mocked” by male drivers or “rejected” by those who would rather prefer a male one to take them to their destination.
In the end, his assumptions were all “a little silly.”
The female taxi driver’s reply concerned basic hygiene issues and that’s all. She said: “The only thing that makes it any harder for a woman taxi driver is that it can be hard to find a bathroom when I have to go.”
A commenter in Pasden’s blog post named Mike said that he found many female taxi drivers in Guangzhou, Wuhan and Tianjin.
Inherent in traditional Chinese culture, women have been perceived to assume a more domesticated role.
But as ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, everything changes and nothing stands still; in modern-day China, the change can be seen in the roads.
More and more women are no longer taking the backseat nor the passenger seat. They are now the ones behind the wheels.
Female taxi drivers can even be better than their male counterparts, at least, for one foreigner who stayed in the country to write a travel book about it.
In her Bradt travel guide book, “Great Wall of China: Beijing & Northern China,” Thammy Evans said that the country’s female taxi drivers are mostly nonsmokers, provide more security and “less likely to rip you off.” She said they are also “easy to find.”
The “Pink Love Action” movement launched in Beijing in Oct. 2014 by China Women's Development Foundation to ensure the safety of female passengers contributed to the increase in the number of female taxi drivers.
There is a new TV show in the works where top celebrity and international muse Fan Bingbing will play the role of a cab driver. And who says female taxi drivers can’t be beautiful, too?
All is fair in love and war, and might as well in driving.
