Uber Will Soon Allow Women Riders to Request Female Drivers

Riders will soon see an option called Women Drivers when requesting a trip on demand, the company announced on Wednesday.

Rachel Acenas

Published: 7/23/2025, 5:00:34 PM EDT

Uber Will Soon Allow Women Riders to Request Female Drivers — A man holds a smartphone showing the app for ride-sharing service Uber in London, England, on March 17, 2021. (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

Ride-hailing giant Uber on Wednesday unveiled a new feature that will allow women riders to be matched with female drivers and vice versa.

The move follows feedback from the company nationwide, according to Uber.

“Across the [United States], women riders and drivers have told us they want the option to be matched with other women on trips,” the company said in a statement. “We’ve heard them—and now we’re introducing new ways to give them even more control over how they ride and drive.”

Riders will soon see an option called Women Drivers when requesting a trip on demand. Similarly, women drivers can choose to only receive ride requests from female riders.

A preference for women drivers and riders will also be available in the app settings.

Uber noted that a woman driver isn't always guaranteed, but turning on the feature increases the chances of being matched with one. The company said one in five of its drivers are women.

Uber first introduced a version of the feature in Saudi Arabia six years ago, shortly after women gained the legal right to drive. Since then, the new feature has expanded to 40 countries and more than 100 million trips.

“Most drivers are men, so we’ve worked to ensure this feature was truly usable in different places around the world," Uber stated. "We tested, listened, and refined it in markets like Germany and France, adapting the feature to real-world rider and driver behaviors. 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.”

Uber currently uses a RideCheck feature, which uses sensors and GPS data that can help detect if a trip doesn’t go as planned. Additionally, all drivers must go through a multi-step background check screening process in order to be considered as a driver.

The new feature is part of Uber's broader efforts to address safety concerns on the platform, specifically for women riders and drivers.

In its latest safety report, the company cited more than 2,700 cases of sexual assault between 2021 and 2022, a drop from the previous year when there were nearly 4,000 cases.

Sixty-eight percent of the incidents involved drivers as the perpetrators, according to the report. Thirty-one percent of the incidents involved passengers as the aggressors.

In March, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the consolidation of more than 1,600 sexual assault lawsuits against the ride-sharing giant. The move allows the lawsuits to proceed before a single judge in San Francisco.

Uber’s new features will first be rolled out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit in the next few weeks.

Last year, rival ride-hailing company Lyft launched the Women+Connect program, which offered women and nonbinary drivers the option to turn on a preference that will prioritize matches with other nearby women and nonbinary riders.