If you’ve been following the reports of this Ridesharing Forum website, the team has touched upon the Women Preferences initiative of Uber.
This feature, launched this year, is beneficial because it helps address long-standing safety concerns. Ridesharing services have met with issues such as assault and sexual violence. Under this initiative, Uber is responding to feedback from women riders and drivers, offering them more confidence and flexibility.
“Across the US, 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,” Uber told Ridesharing Forum. “For the first time in the US, we’re launching Women Preferences – features designed to give women riders and drivers more choice, more confidence, and more flexibility when they use Uber.”
Today, Uber has announced that it is adding 26 cities and more to those covered by its Women Preferences. Incredible! Amazing!
These 26 new cities, along with the others, include:
- Tampa
- Orlando
- Jacksonville
- New Orleans
- Houston
- Dallas-Fort Worth
- San Antonio
- Charlotte
- Nashville
- St. Louis
- Raleigh-Durham
- Hampton Roads
- Baltimore
- Columbus
- Chicago
- Milwaukee
- Pittsburgh
- Connecticut
- Cleveland
- Detroit
- Upstate New York
- Rhode Island
- Denver
- Phoenix
- Salt Lake City
- Las Vegas
- Sacramento
- Los Angeles
- San Diego
- San Francisco
So, those cities are not yet using Women Preferences? Apparently, yes. Nonetheless, it’s a major milestone, especially that this initiative has been very successful in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.
Both riders and drivers are going to benefit from this. You know women riders could choose women drivers under this feature.
For one, they can request on-demand, wherein they could see options called “Women Drivers.” If the wait time is longer than they expect, they could opt for another ride, still with a female driver.
Aside from that, they may also reserve in advance and set a preference. For more planning and certainly, women passengers could utilize the Reserve option to pre-order trips with women drivers, of course. Then, they could set a preference for a woman driver in their app settings. While not guaranteed, turning on this option increases your chances of being matched with a woman driver. In other words, there is no assurance, but because this feature is on, there are more chances your driver will be a female.
Drivers, too, could enjoy the feature as much as passengers do. Female drivers could simply toggle on the “Women Rider Preference” in their application settings to start getting trip requests from women riders. This offers drivers new ways to earn on their terms with flexibility and confidence. If they wish to get trip requests from all riders, they could turn off this option at any given time.
“We’ll also be making the preference available to women drivers nationwide soon. We believe this is an important step in bringing more women onto the Uber platform to earn on their terms and support existing women drivers as we look to expand women-only options for riders nationwide,” Uber told the Ridesharing Forum team.