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Uber’s New Feature Lets Women Choose Women Drivers. Now It’s Facing a Lawsuit.
For millions of women across the United States, getting into a stranger’s car has carried an undercurrent of anxiety that no smooth pickup experience could fully erase. Reports of sexual assault, uncomfortable rides, and a persistent sense of vulnerability have followed ride-hailing platforms for years, and no amount of background checks or community guidelines has fully put those concerns to rest. Uber has spent years collecting that feedback from women on its platform, and on March 9, 2026, International Women’s Day, it announced what it believes is a meaningful answer. Starting Monday, women riders and drivers across the country can choose to be matched with each other, a feature Uber says was built entirely because women asked for it. Whether it satisfies safety advocates, survives a growing legal challenge, or simply becomes a fixture of how millions of women ride, remains to be seen.
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A Nationwide Rollout, Years in the Making
Uber’s Women Preferences feature went live across the United States on Monday, giving women riders and drivers the ability to match with each other for trips. Cities now covered include New York, Washington D.C., Austin, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, among others, completing a rollout that had been building since a limited pilot launched in the summer of 2025.
Brooke Anderson, Uber’s Head of Product Communications, was direct about what drove the decision. “Women asked for more choice, and we built it with Women Preferences,” she said. “This feature exists because women told us it should, and we are proud to expand Women Preferences nationwide and bring more flexibility and control to millions more women.”
For Uber, the announcement carried a deliberate symbolic weight. Launching on International Women’s Day was not an accident. Nor was framing the feature as something born from listening rather than corporate initiative. Women Preferences, the company has said repeatedly, did not come from a product team pitching ideas in a conference room. It came from women using the app and asking for something different.
Three Ways to Use It
Women riders now have three distinct options when it comes to requesting a female driver. First, they can select “Women Drivers” when ordering a trip on demand, with the option to switch to a standard ride if the wait runs longer than expected. Second, they can reserve a trip with a woman driver in advance, which gives more planning certainty for scheduled journeys like airport runs or early morning commutes. Third, they can set a standing preference in their app settings that increases the likelihood of being matched with a woman driver without guaranteeing it.
Women drivers get their own version of the feature. By toggling a preference in their settings, they can opt to receive trip requests from women riders only, giving them more say over who gets into their car and, by extension, how they choose to earn.
Families using Uber’s teen accounts can also access the feature. In cities where teen accounts are active, parents and guardians can request women drivers for their children, both for on-demand trips and reservations. For parents already cautious about their teenagers using ride-hailing services, that option represents a meaningful, if incremental, layer of reassurance.
Where It Started
Women Preferences did not begin in California or New York. It started in Saudi Arabia in 2019, in the immediate aftermath of the country’s landmark decision to grant women the right to drive. Uber launched the feature there to give Saudi women drivers a degree of control over an experience that was, for many of them, entirely new.
What began as a culturally specific response to a specific moment has since grown into something far wider. More than 230 million global trips later, Women Preferences is available for drivers in over 40 countries and for riders across seven countries, including Germany, France, Portugal, Brazil, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and now the United States in full.
Uber ran its first American pilots in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit in the summer of 2025, then expanded to 60 U.S. cities before the year ended. Monday’s announcement brought the feature to the rest of the country. For a company that has long faced pointed questions about safety on its platform, the global scale of Women Preferences has become one of its more prominent responses to those questions.
The Safety Record That Made This Necessary
Uber and Lyft have faced years of criticism over safety, and the record is difficult to ignore. Uber’s own data reported 5,981 incidents of sexual assault in U.S. rides between 2017 and 2018. Between 2021 and 2022, the most recent years with available data, that figure had dropped to 2,717. Uber has pointed to that decline as evidence that its safety measures are working, noting it represents 0.0001 percent of total trips taken nationwide.
Critics have argued that those numbers, even reduced, remain alarming for a platform moving billions of passengers. In February 2026, a federal jury found Uber legally responsible in a 2023 sexual assault case and ordered the company to pay $8.5 million to an Arizona woman who said she was raped by one of its drivers. Uber said it planned to appeal the verdict.
Uber’s long-standing legal position is that because its drivers are independent contractors rather than employees, the company cannot be held liable for their misconduct. It has, however, taken some collaborative steps over the years, including partnering with Lyft in 2021 to build a shared database of drivers removed from either platform for sexual assault and other serious complaints.
Women Preferences sits within that broader effort to rebuild confidence among female users, though it is worth being clear about what the feature does and does not do. Matching a passenger with a woman driver does not eliminate risk, and Uber has not claimed otherwise. What it does is give women a choice they did not previously have.
One in Five Drivers Is a Woman
About 20 percent of Uber’s drivers in the United States are women, though the ratio shifts considerably from city to city. That number matters for anyone thinking carefully about how women’s preferences actually function in practice.
When a large share of the rider base opts into a preference for female drivers, and only a fraction of the total driver pool is female, wait times go up. Uber has tried to address that tension by building in flexibility. Women who select Women Drivers on demand can opt out at any point if the wait becomes impractical. No one is locked in.
Still, the supply-and-demand gap is real, and it shapes the experience of the feature as much as any product decision Uber has made. In cities with higher concentrations of women drivers, Women’s Preferences will work more smoothly. In cities where female drivers are rare, riders may find themselves switching to a standard ride more often than not.
A Lawsuit That Calls It Discrimination
Not everyone has welcomed the rollout. In November 2025, two California Uber drivers filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that Women’s Preferences violates California’s Unruh Act, a state law that prohibits sex discrimination by business enterprises. Their case rests on a specific economic argument that female drivers gain access to the full pool of passengers, while male drivers are left competing for a smaller pool after women riders opt out of being matched with them.
Uber fired back with a motion to compel arbitration, citing the agreements drivers sign when joining the platform. In that motion, Uber disputed that Women’s Preferences runs afoul of the Unruh Act, arguing instead that the feature “serves a strong and recognized public policy interest in enhancing safety.”
Lyft is fighting a parallel battle. Its “Women+Connect” feature, introduced in 2024 and allowing women and non-binary riders to prioritise matches with drivers sharing the same identification, drew a similar lawsuit from two of its own drivers. Both cases remain ongoing, and the outcomes could have consequences that reach well beyond either company.
What Women Are Actually Saying
Amid the legal noise, Uber has pointed to something quieter: the responses from women who have used the feature during its pilot phase. Women riders described feeling “more comfortable in the back seat,” while women drivers said they felt “more confident behind the wheel.” Neither quote sounds like a marketing line, which may be why Uber has leaned on them.
Uber described women’s preferences in a recent court filing as “a common sense solution to a long-standing request from both women drivers and riders who told Uber they would feel more comfortable and safer if they could choose to ride with another woman.” Whether a court in California agrees with that framing is now a question for judges and juries rather than product teams.
A Step, Not a Solution
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Women’s preferences do not resolve every concern women have about ride-hailing. It does not change the contractor model that has defined how Uber treats its drivers for over a decade. It does not undo years of safety failures that filled court dockets and congressional testimony. What it does is hand women a specific piece of control that many of them asked for and did not have before.
Uber has said publicly that it intends to keep expanding the feature globally. For now, its American rollout is the most significant version of that promise. How well it holds up against legal challenges, supply constraints, and the expectations of millions of women who opted in will define whether Women’s Preferences becomes a lasting part of how ride-hailing works or a well-intentioned feature that ran into too many walls.