Driving a cab (or just “driving cab,” as the drivers themselves call it) is one of those jobs that remains overwhelmingly dominated by men. There are women in the business, but they’re rare — I got a ride from one a few weeks ago and interviewed her on the spot about her job, as I do almost every driver I meet, and she claimed to be the only female cab driver she personally knew.

It’s also one of those unglamourous positions, like, say, front-line combat soldiers, men’s room attendants and restaurant dishwashers, about which almost no one discusses the patriarchal glass floor that women are having trouble descending below. It’s a shitty job, and a dangerous one, and I get the impression very few women are interested in taking it up.

But it does have its charms, especially ones that appeal to the conventional male imagination: you set your own hours, no one tells you when you can take a break, you can hustle if you want to get a little more, take a few hours to head to the track if you’re feeling lazy, and then of course you’ve got four wheels, an engine and the road in front of you, which seems to be where many men feel most at home.

My father-in-law is a University Professor and internationally successful author, but he drove cab while he was working on his Ph. D. and still says that, in many ways, it was the best job he ever had. One cab driver I used to sort of know (I worked with his brother), an immigrant from India who lived in an apartment stuffed with prep cooks and factory workers who took shifts in their shared beds while they saved money to bring the family over from home, quit his job as a T.A. at York University to return to taxi driving. He called it his “freedom job.”

But not many people choose it. I recently wrote a story for Canadian Immigrant magazine about the conversational cliche of immigrant cab drivers who appear to be overqualified but whose foreign credentials and experience are not recognized in Canada. It was an interesting and heartbreaking story to research. (I kept waiting for one of them to tell me he wished a real rain would come and wash all the scum off the streets, but the ones I spoke to were universally even-keeled and relatively cheerful.)

No big revelation here, but a minor, interesting note: the phenomenon of self-absorbed avoidance of responsibility doesn’t seem to afflict the immigrant communities who make up today’s cab driving employment pool. Almost all the drivers told me they got into the business because the work was available and they had families to support. So they work 70 or 80 hours a week to make a better life for their kids, dealing with drunks and fare-skippers and rush hour traffic, and though a great many of them are qualified doctors or engineers or whatever, they’re mostly stunningly unbitter about it. Disappointed, yes, but not angry. Their response is more of a shrug: It’s not what I planned, but hey — a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

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Posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 9:40 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.