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Uber is piloting a new option for its US app that will allow female passengers to request women drivers, coming after the company has long grappled with preventing sexual assault on its platform.
The feature, called Women Preferences, will launch in a pilot stage in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit in the next few weeks, Uber said in a blog post on Wednesday. It marks the first time the popular ride share app is bringing this option to its service in the United States after launching it in 40 other countries.
Uber joins Lyft and other taxi hailing apps, like HERide and Just Her Rideshare, that connect female passengers with women drivers.
“Across the US, women riders and drivers have told us they want the option to be matched with other women on trips,” Camiel Irving, vice president of operations in the US and Canada, said in a press release.
Women riders in cities where the feature is available will see a new option called Women Drivers. They’ll also be able to pre-book rides with women drivers and set a preference in the app to be matched with a female driver.
The feature works both ways; women drivers will be able to request female passengers too with a new “Women Rider Preference” option in the settings menu. Riders and drivers will still be able to connect more broadly with non-female passengers and drivers if they wish, even with these preferences set.
The company conducted testing and collected feedback from other markets like Germany and France to make sure the feature would work reliably considering most Uber drivers are men, Irving wrote in Uber’s blog post.
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. 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.
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