Uber is taking a major step in prioritizing riders’ safety.
Indeed, the popular ride share service announced their new Women’s Preference feature, which allows women customers to match with women drivers when booking a trip.
“We believe that when we make our platform better for women, we make it better for everyone,” the company’s vice president of operations, U.S. and Canada, Camiel Irving, said in a July 23 statement. “Across the U.S., women riders and drivers have told us they want the option to be matched with other women on trips. We’ve heard them—and now we’re introducing new ways to give them even more control over how they ride and drive.”
The upcoming program—which will roll out in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit in the “next few weeks”—isn’t limited to just rider preferences. In fact, Uber revealed that women drivers can also “request trips with women riders, including during peak earning hours like evenings.” As for passengers, they can access the feature by creating a preference in their app settings.
The company noted that while a riders’ preference is “not guaranteed,” the feature increases the chances that women will be paired on their specific ride.
This program is an elevated version of their Women Rider Preference, which Uber first launched in Saudi Arabia in 2019—one year after the country passed a law that allowed women the right to drive. The feature has “expanded to 40 countries,” including Germany and France, since then, and the platform wanted to extend this offer to riders.
“Most drivers are men, so we’ve worked to ensure this feature was truly usable in different places around the world,” Irving explained. “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.”
And their efforts to protect women passengers and drivers doesn’t end at this feature.
“As we expand Women Preferences across the U.S.,” Irving continued, “we’ll continue improving the experience through education, partnerships, and features.”
