Uber Will Let Women Drivers And Riders Request To Avoid Being Paired With Men Starting Next Month

In July 2025 Uber announced that women in the U.S. will soon be able to request rides exclusively with women drivers, while women drivers will be able to choose to only accept women riders. The pilot begins next month in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit, following years of pressure on ride-hailing companies to better protect users.

Why Uber is making this move now

For more than a decade, Uber and Lyft have been criticized for passenger safety lapses and harassment reports. Despite background checks, countless riders, especially women, have shared experiences of feeling unsafe in the backseat of a stranger’s car. Uber has responded with incremental changes like selfie verification for drivers, PIN codes for matching, and teen accounts with parental oversight. But the women-only feature is its most direct attempt yet to address gender-based discomfort and risk.

The company has precedent abroad. In 2019, Uber quietly introduced a women-rider preference in Saudi Arabia after the country allowed women to drive. That program expanded to about 40 countries, including France, Germany, and Argentina, and proved popular among women riders. Now Uber is finally bringing the concept home to the United States.

How the new option works

• Women riders will be able to select a preference for female drivers in the app settings.
• Women drivers can choose to only accept trips from women passengers.
• The match is not guaranteed. If no female drivers are available nearby, the system defaults to standard matching, but the odds of being paired with another woman increase significantly.
• The rollout will start with pilots in three major cities, with the potential for national expansion.

Uber’s vice president of U.S. and Canada operations, Camiel Irving, framed the update as a matter of control: “It’s about giving women more choice, more control, and more comfort when they ride and drive.”

The real-world concerns behind it

Women make up only a fraction of Uber’s driver pool, estimates hover around 20% in the U.S., and in some cities far less. Many women who tried driving quit after facing harassment, uncomfortable comments, or late-night safety fears. By allowing women to limit who they pick up, Uber is hoping to recruit and retain more female drivers.

For riders, the stakes feel higher. Stories of harassment, unwanted advances, and even violent crimes in rideshares have circulated for years. A young college student getting a late-night ride home, or a mother booking a ride for her teenage daughter, may see a female driver as a reassuring safeguard.

Pushback and unanswered questions

The feature is already stirring debate. Critics argue it could amount to discrimination by sex, raising questions about legality in the U.S. Others worry that Uber is using this as a band-aid solution rather than investing more heavily in stricter background checks, better enforcement of bans, or stronger protections against account sharing, where men sometimes drive under women’s accounts.

There’s also a practical challenge: what happens in areas with very few women drivers? Lyft rolled out a similar program in 2023 pairing women and nonbinary drivers and riders, but many users complained they still ended up matched with men because of availability issues. Without a robust network of female drivers, Uber’s promise may fall short in practice.

Why this still matters

Despite the flaws, the move marks a cultural shift in how tech platforms acknowledge gendered safety risks. For years, women were told to trust existing safeguards. Now Uber is conceding that one of the best ways to improve safety is simply to let women avoid men when they want to.

This could have ripple effects:

• Encouraging more women to sign up as drivers by lowering their risk of harassment.
• Normalizing rider preferences, from safety-focused ones to lifestyle-based ones.
• Forcing regulators to examine the balance between safety-driven discrimination and equal-access principles.

A step forward, not a solution

The women-only option won’t erase deeper issues of trust in ridesharing. It won’t stop predators from slipping through background checks, nor will it address systemic flaws like lax enforcement against account swapping. It also doesn’t guarantee safety, harassment can come from women too, though less frequently reported.

But for many women, the psychological comfort of seeing a female driver pull up to the curb may be reason enough to keep choosing Uber. And in an industry where perception of safety is as important as safety itself, that alone could make this feature stick.

For now, the experiment begins with three cities, and the outcome will likely decide if Uber expands it nationwide. What’s clear is that in 2025, safety and control are no longer side features in the rideshare market, they are the product.