Most Uber trips end without incident, but for many women, the threat of sexual harassment and assault looms large. According to Uber’s own data, thousands of women have been victims of sexual violence in an Uber vehicle over the years. Today, Uber is taking a step to mitigate that risk by making it easier for women to request drivers who are also women.
Uber is creating multiple ways to do this. First, just by opening the app, women customers will see a new option to request a woman driver. If they’re booking a ride in advance, they’ll also be able to select a woman driver. And they can adjust their settings to indicate a preference for a woman driver in all circumstances. Selecting that preference could increase wait times, as most Uber drivers are men. If time is of the essence, women can always opt for another ride with a faster pickup.
The feature is not exclusive to riders. Women drivers can also adjust their settings to request women passengers, including during peak earning periods like evenings. If they want to receive trip requests from all riders, they can turn the preference off at any time. The new feature will roll out first in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit over the next few weeks.
As a safety measure, Uber requires that both riders and drivers verify their identity before using the app. However, if a woman thinks she’s being paired with another woman, either rider or driver, and a man shows up, Uber recommends they cancel the ride and report the incident to the company.
This isn’t the first time Uber is allowing women to pair up through the app. The company first released its Women Rider Preference feature in Saudi Arabia in 2019, a year after the nation lifted its ban on women driving. Since then the feature has been introduced in 40 countries.
The challenge is to make the service work “reliably,” even while dealing with gender-based preferences, said Camiel Irving, Uber’s VP of Operations for the US and Canada.
“Most drivers are men, so we’ve worked to ensure this feature was truly usable in different places around the world,” Irving said in a post. “We tested, listened, and refined it in markets like Germany and France, adapting the feature to real-world rider and driver behaviors. As a result, in a first for the industry, we’re able to launch more reliable features that offer women riders multiple ways to be matched with a woman driver.”
Since 2019, Uber has released safety reports that disclose the number of reported incidents of sexual harassment and assaults that take place in its vehicles. Its last report, released in 2024 and covering the years 2021–22, said there were 2,717 incidents of “serious sexual assault and misconduct,” a decrease of 22 percent from the previous report.
It’s a problem that has been plaguing the industry for years. In a 2022 feature in The Verge, dozens of women rideshare drivers spoke about their experiences with harassment and assault.
Many said they have taken to carrying pepper spray or other defensive weapons in their vehicles in defiance of the app company’s policies banning such items. All of the drivers said that they do not feel completely protected or supported by the companies on whose platforms they conduct their business.
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Uber’s making it easier for women riders and drivers to find each other