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Unfortunately necessary. Essentially every girl I know has had at least one bad experience with a creepy uber driver. These are people that are entering their address and often their workplace into the app. It's a big reason why a lot of my friends are picking Waymos instead.
I drove for Uber back in like 2016, right around when Pool was introduced. Picked this dude up and then had to stop to pick up another fair, he saw it was a woman's name on the app, and when she called me to figure out where I was at he immediately started yelling sexual stuff into my ear piece.

Of course she immediately hung up and cancelled the ride. I drove a few blocks in the opposite direction he wanted to go and threw him out of my car.

That's how he acted with me in the car. Can't imagine how he would have been alone with a female driver.

> picking Waymos instead.

Can you pick Waymos? I was in Austin with my daughter who Ubers quite a bit (because dear God there's nowhere to park in that damned city) this weekend. She called an Uber and a Waymo showed up and she was grateful because she prefers them too, but she said that she's not aware of a way to specify that you just want a Waymo.

Fully agree and am pretty disappointed reading replies on here. Anyone familiar with the demographics of this forum? What % male is it? If you have women in your life, ask their thoughts on this. It’s easy to not understand problems that don’t exist for us.
Not necessary and unfairly punishing working men and defacto creating a 50% quota larger market share for female drivers.
So Uber is finally dropping the pretense of "vetted drivers" and "strict background checks" and whatever else they claim in their advertising. It's good that women get this service, but I'd be pretty concerned as a man as well. At this point whenever I call an Uber it's a 50/50 whether the person and car listed in the app will be the one picking me up. A lot of times I wonder if the driver has a license or insurance at all. They've been churning through drivers so quickly over the last decade that it's now impossible to get new ones on the service without massively lowering standards and looking the other way when something comes up as irregular.
They're going to spin it as a concession of the lawsuits they're facing, and they're face plenty, regarding the sexual assault of women from drivers.

This isn't being done because they want to, users have been asking for this since pretty early in ridesharing history. They're pre-empting the lawsuits and their consequences

Sex is a protected class under Title VII of the civil rights act. And the supreme court recently said that even majority classes (men) are protected by this. Since Uber involved in the decision to send more business to female drivers than male drivers, this would seem to me to run afoul of employment discrimination (sorry we don't need as many men workers today, too many of you competing so market forces mean we're going to pay you less, etc).

Can someone explain to me how this is (or isn't) legal under Title VII?

It seems if this is fully legal because it's the customer making the decision, then pretty much any form of "in app" discrimination is legal as long as it's the customer doing the discrimination. How long till "I don't want a black/white/gay/etc driver" options show up?

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — George Orwell, Animal Farm

This is not new, it seems, although the previous ones were just tests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44659635

Lyft already has such a feature, and personally I've been getting into Empower more, which also has the feature. This app pays more for drivers due to not actually acting as a taxi company but simply connecting the driver and rider marketplaces, something Uber tried to do as well but failed due to legal challenges as well as keeping margin for themselves. Empower just charged $50 per month to drivers as a subscription fee for the service and then lets them keep all the actual ride money.

However, just as with a marketplace connector like TripAdvisor or TaskRabbit, your mileage may vary (literally) in terms of driver ratings and safety, due to Empower not doing as comprehensive background checks as Uber or Lyft, so it is up to your personal risk tolerance.

Uber is already being sued by male drivers in California:

https://onlabor.org/january-25-2026

I think the lawsuits probably make sense. While you can claim that there is a statistical danger, you can make that same claim about a number of other protected characteristics. Would we allow riders to request only female, heterosexual, over 45, wealthy Quaker drivers, if that happens to be the statistically safest driver characteristic?

The real problem is that this is necessary.

This same thing that keeps on happening when we try to reinvent things "without all that stuff that just adds friction." As with software, one should understand the underlying reasons for constraints in the old system before building the second one.

Banking -> crypto and NFT "without all that stuff..." -> wash trading.

Taxi service -> Uber "without all that employer stuff..." -> drivers with no background checks and no interview process

I understand part of this is routing around the damage of monopoly maintenance (medallion system, for example), but let's fix that instead of taking away the protections in place.

Sorry for the rant. I know this is like asking water to run uphill.

Car share apps could have a camera and audio on mode.

- The inside of the car is surveilled and made available for both parties after the ride.

- The intent is made clear, that this is to capture a trace of any harassment or misconduct. Hopefully making this statement puts all parties on their best behaviour.

- Any failure to comply by the driver, camera blocked or audio muffled, then driver gets penalised.

Does anyone have experience using this feature? I can't imagine it'll be easy to get matched with a female driver. From my own experience Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers are seemingly 99%+ men.
Absolutely wild that none of the dissenting comments suggest a means of lowering or eliminating sexual harassment of women passengers. Why not start there? Get creative.
A population of class action attorneys just smiled. A paycheck is materializing.
If this form of discrimination is ok, can we get other filters?
They're also doing it in Berlin, Frankfurt and München. Bolt is offering it in Berlin.

I dislike Uber, I'd rather walk than take one, but if it has to exist, I think it's awesome they're doing this.

There is also a women-exclusive company in Berlin now: https://g-cars.co/

Only women can request women drivers? Ok. Will trans women and intersex people be allowed to request women drivers? They are an especially vulnerable group.

What about women drivers?

How will the boundaries of these classifications be determined, and what happens when someone tests these boundaries?

While I‘m glad that there’s an immediate safe option for women riders, in the longer term this lets Uber off the hook when they should be taking responsibility for their drivers who are functionally employees despite Uber insisting otherwise. It’s worth noting that the old school taxi companies did not have this problem of rampant sexual assault committed by their drivers. Why? Because they performed background checks before hire. I know that at least in Chicago it was very difficult to get licensed as a taxi driver. The problem with Uber is that they make it very very easy for shady individuals to be drivers, then act like they have no control over who’s driving.
I think there is nothing wrong with this change. Customers should be able to patronize, with great granularity, the sort of businesses, employees, and people that they wish to. The push to advertise "black owned" or "women owned" businesses is similar to this. Letting people choose who to patronize is generally good.

It would be better to have more filtering options for everyone, though. One might prefer a male driver, for example, or a black driver, and if one wishes to wait longer for the driver to arrive because of their narrow preferences, that should be their right.

"As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all."

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm

Bolt have that too in Europe https://i.imgur.com/qAkPtbt.jpeg
That might be tough - I remember having plenty of women drivers back in 2012 when uber and Lyft just got started. These days they’re extremely rare.
Does this even matter right now? The number of female drivers is quite small. Maybe later on, there'll be another controversy whether to take a male or female drive, just like it happened with taxis taking over Uberists in the beginning. Time and good security frameworks will place this into "something else" that happened at some time.
Does this mean women drivers will command higher rates?
This is a great change!
We are reinventing, from first principles, the discrimination we fought so hard against in the 20th century.
Uber is only getting this now? Wasn't this like a core offering of its longtime competitor, Lyft?
Better late than never?
I think this is blatant sexual discrimination. I appreciate the sentiment behind it, but it's discriminatory. Maybe if someone can request a male driver instead of female it MIGHT eventually balance out, but I don't see this surviving judicial scrutiny.
Well, if you can't stop the Johns from being animals, that's the only thing left to do.
We either care about sex discrimination everywhere, or we don't actually care about it at all.

"I like discrimination when it's good for me" is not a serious position.

Great solution, next do special women subway coaches, separate public buses to mixed vs women areas and separate girls and boys in school, down to road we can introduce burqa just to make sure nobody has reason to attack women.
The shift toward Waymo mentioned in the comments is a perfect example of how 'low-trust' environments drive automation. People aren't just choosing autonomous vehicles for the tech; they’re choosing them to remove the human variable entirely. If a platform like Uber can't guarantee safety through its vetting process, the market will naturally move toward solutions that eliminate the need for trust in the first place. It’s a sad commentary on the state of the gig economy when the 'killer feature' is just the absence of another person.