Uber introduced a rider option called Women Preferences that lets female riders request female drivers on-demand or by advance reservation, featuring an account setting to save the preference. The company expanded the capability after a pilot that began in summer 2025 and rolled it out to 26 U.S. cities in fall 2025, and later to riders in seven countries and drivers in 40+ countries.
The feature allows customers to switch to a faster ride if wait times are long and gives drivers a way to opt into accepting Women Preferences requests.
For consumers, the option adds a privacy- and comfort-focused layer to booking, reflecting broader mobility trends toward personalized safety choices and control over who provides a service.
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Key Themes Behind This Trend
- Personalized Safety Preferences
- A market for hyper-personalized safety settings in mobility apps that can redefine user trust metrics.
- Gender-targeted Service Matchmaking
- An emergence of algorithms matching riders and providers by demographic preference that can reshape platform matching economics.
- Advance Reservation for Preferred Providers
- Systems for scheduled pairing of preferred providers that could shift on-demand paradigms toward reservation-first models.
Where This Applies
- Ridesharing and Mobility
- Demand for gender-specific options creating new product tiers and pricing strategies within urban transport services.
- Workforce Management and Driver Platforms
- Driver opt-in features prompting platforms to redesign incentive structures and labor segmentation.
- Privacy-focused Consumer Tech
- In-app privacy controls tied to identity preferences offering opportunities for differentiated trust signals and verification services.
