• by Tanya Gazdik , Yesterday

Uber is launching features designed to give women riders and drivers more choice when they use the ride-sharing service.  

“Across the U.S., women riders and drivers have told us they want the option to be matched with other women on trips,” says Camiel Irving, vice president of operations, U.S. and Canada, in a post on Uber’s website. “We’ve heard them—and now we’re introducing new ways to give them even more control over how they ride and drive.”

Pilots will begin in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit in the next few weeks, three cities where where Uber has gotten the most requests for this service, according to Oprah Daily. 

Women riders will soon have more ways to choose rides with women drivers, either via on-demand request, by reserving in advance, or by selecting a preference for a woman driver in their app settings. 

Conversely, women drivers will soon have the option to request trips with women riders, including during peak earning hours like evenings. Women drivers can simply toggle on the “Women Rider Preference” in their app settings. If they want to receive trip requests from all riders, they can turn the preference off at any time.

“Ride-hailing platforms including Uber have long faced pressure to improve safety for both drivers and riders,” according to the Washington Post. “Uber disclosed thousands of reports of sexual assault during U.S. rides between 2017 and 2022. Uber and Lyft began sharing infomration in 2021 on drivers they had deactivated in an effort to improve rider safety. Uber previously rolled out a feature that enables riders and drivers to record audio on trips. These recordings are encrypted and can be accessed by Uber only when an incident is reported.”

Sexual assault has been a problem for Uber for years.

“Nearly 6,000 sexual assault reports were made from 2017-2018, according to Uber’s safety report,” per CNN Business. “That number has dropped significantly to 2,717 by 2022, the report says, although five passengers sued Uber in 2022 over sexual assault incidents that occurred between August 2021 and February 2022. The California Public Utilities Commission fined Uber $59 million in 2020 for not handing over sexual assault data, but that fine was slashed to $150,000 after the company cut a deal requiring it to provide anonymized data on sexual assault incidents.”

Uber has launched other features to promote safety in recent years, such as a hub in the app for managing safety preferences.

There are several smaller rideshare companies that are only for women, such as HERide in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, and North Carolina-based Just Her Rideshare. Lyft launched a similar feature called Women+ Connect in 2023. 

“Uber first launched a Women Rider Preference feature for drivers in Saudi Arabia in 2019 to an overwhelmingly positive response, after a landmark law granted women the right to drive,” according to ABC News. “Since the first launch, Uber has expanded the feature to 40 additional countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, India, Mexico and Poland.”

More than 100 million “Women Rider Preference” trips have been completed, per Uber. 

“Of course, riders wanted the same choice,” Irving says. “But making this work reliably—not just symbolically—required thoughtful design. Most drivers are men, so we’ve worked to ensure this feature was truly usable in different places around the world. We tested, listened, and refined it in markets like Germany and France, adapting the feature to real-world rider and driver behaviors.”