Ride-hailing service Uber likes to tout itself as a large-scale job creator. What it doesn't like to say is that most of its driver jobs are going to men.
Only 14% of U.S. Uber drivers are women -- a little higher than the 12.7% of U.S. taxi drivers and chauffeurs that are women and much higher than the 1% of New York City cabbies that are women. Competitors Lyft and Sidecar have more than twice Uber's proportion of female drivers -- 30% and 40%, respectively -- but are still not recruiting them at the same rate as men.
Why aren't more women taking these jobs? Ride-hailing apps keep drivers safer than cab drivers by getting rid of cash and tracking each ride, and many workers appreciate the flexible work hours. But the job still involves driving alone and picking up strangers, often at night -- situations that many women feel are dangerous. In interviews with eight female on-demand drivers, FORBES found that they usually feel safe but sometimes have doubts after troubling experiences and holes in safety policies. They also said the job was almost always perceived to be less safe than they feel it is, which turns away potential drivers.
"This economic opportunity has excluded women -- not purposefully, but women have self-selected out of it," said Nick Allen, a cofounder and former CFO of Sidecar who left to start Shuddle, a ride service for children. "And the number one reason they do that is the perception of safety or lack thereof.
"You hear the horror stories of a drunk guy being forward or not respecting the boundaries of the relationship," Allen added. "You have to go with the flow, trust that everything is going to be okay. It's instantly not something that appeals to most women."
Uber knows this is a problem. Last month, the company pledged to create 1 million driver jobs for women by 2020, a promise that was accompanied by a "global partnership" with UN Women and a rosy video highlighting women at the wheel. But that announcement hit a bump a week later when UN Women backed away from the partnership under pressure from union groups who called Uber driver jobs "precarious." (Uber's million-job pledge still stands, the company said.)
Women aren't just good for a company's image. They tend to be less risky drivers and cheaper to insure. Female passengers, fearful after numerous incidents where male drivers have raped, assaulted or harassed passengers, likely would welcome women drivers. And when companies need new drivers so badly that they're shelling out thousands of dollars to get just one, striking out with half the population is a bad business bet.
Women are so unlikely to become drivers that SheTaxis, a new service which planned to be exclusively women driving women, had to partner with mostly male limo services to meet demand. SheTaxis has about 500 female drivers, but spokeswoman Tamika Mallory wouldn't say what their female-to-male ratio was, just that "it leans more toward males." The exceptions to this pattern are Uber-for-kids startups like Shuddle and HopSkipDrive, whose drivers are almost all women -- though that's both because women feel safer driving kids and because the companies hire people with caregiver experience, a pool that's mostly women.
'You Have To Be That Woman That's Going To Say, "Don't Touch Me"'
In January, a drunk male passenger sitting in the front seat of an Atlanta woman's Uber asked her to drive him to a strip club, then asked if she wanted to "make some extra money" and "dance for him," the driver told a local tech blog. After she declined, she said he reached over and rubbed her thighs and breasts while she was driving and asked if she had ever had sex in a car. Once they stopped driving, he allegedly grabbed her face and tried to kiss her before getting out.
That driver, who did not want to be named, reported the alleged sexual assault that night, but she said Uber didn't remove the passenger from the platform or contact her except by form email until more than a week later, when a local reporter asked about the incident.
"I was so disappointed in the way Uber handled my situation," she told FORBES. "I decided never to drive for Uber again."
Even drivers who think the job is safe -- and many said they enjoy it and feel comfortable driving -- have had a creepy experience or two.
"You get propositioned for sex sometimes," said Sarah Savin, a 29-year-old Uber and Lyft driver in Los Angeles. "A drunk guy, sitting up front, asked me if I wanted to come upstairs. I was like, 'Let me tell you all about my church.' That was the only time I thought to myself, 'Please don't force me to do anything.'"
Kay Luja, a 44-year-old San Francisco Uber and Lyft driver, said she vividly remembers a "somewhat aggressive" Lyft rider who she picked up one night from a music festival. He kept coming on to her even though she turned him down several times. "He took off his seatbelt and started to approach me. I made him sit back and buckle up," she said. "He did live in this really obscure neighborhood and I was a little scared, like, 'Are you sure you live here?'"
Another Uber driver, an Arizona woman in her 30s who didn't want to be named, said that getting asked to come home with drunk male passengers is something every female driver should be prepared for.
"About five times in about 1,000 rides, I've had a man that lets his hand wander over to my leg, touch my hand," she said. "You have to be that woman that's going to say, 'Don't touch me,' that says, 'Get out.'"
The situation gets worse in the close quarters of a moving car. "You don't just get to turn someone down and walk away," Savin said. "You have to sit in the car with them."
Non-sexual assaults on drivers can also leave women feeling unsafe. Last month, a 51-year-old Los Angeles Uber driver said her two male passengers hit her in the face repeatedly with a thorny rose one night after she told them not to slam her car door.
"There are women drivers who, if they knew they could pick up only women passengers, would work later at night, would work more hours," said Mallory, the SheTaxis spokeswoman.
App, Policy Safety Holes
Company policies can also make the job less hospitable to women. Uber and Lyft give bonuses or hourly guarantees for late-night and weekend driving, which makes it harder for those who feel uncomfortable working those hours to earn good pay. And in order to get those payouts, drivers have to accept 90% of rides, which means there's pressure to pick up fares even if they seem sketchy. Drivers can cancel, but Lyft will count cancellations against them unless they specifically write in to say they felt unsafe.
"Because it was so hard to catch a fare to begin with, I never turned down a ride no matter how inconvenient the location was, how low the passenger’s rating was or how uncomfortable the passenger made me," a Lyft driver wrote. "I simply wasn’t making enough money to be choosy."
The apps themselves have safety holes. The Arizona driver said she was once scared when a passenger said he was on LSD in her car, but because the Uber app doesn't let drivers block a specific passenger, she got a request from him again. Lyft blocks drivers and passengers from getting matched if either has rated the other as three stars or below. Neither company systematically removes passengers with low ratings, though if drivers' ratings dip even close to four out of five stars, they're often fired.
Passengers have also exploited Uber's lost-and-found feature to harass female drivers long after the ride is over, BuzzFeed News reported in February. Other app features meant to protect female passengers don't protect female drivers the same way. Sidecar, whose marketplace setup lets riders pick from a lineup of several drivers, received some press attention in December when the company highlighted how women were using it to get a female driver when they wanted to feel safe. But men could use the feature, too.
"The intention there is a good one, but you can't do it just halfway," said Allen, the former Sidecar CFO. "The problem with a feature like that is, well, anyone can request a woman."
'Perception Keeps Them Away'
Still, many of the drivers interviewed said they felt the job was much safer than most people assume -- "nothing that would scare me into not driving again," said Liz Temkin, a 59-year-old Los Angeles Uber and Lyft driver.
But the perception holds strong, and fear is a major deterrent. Passengers constantly ask the drivers if it's a safe job. Men tell them they wouldn't let their wives or girlfriends drive.
"Lyft, Uber and Sidecar combined are doing north of 1 million rides per day," Allen said. "If the perceived risk matched the actual risk you'd hear about a lot more incidents. But perception is reality in many cases. It keeps them away."
Of the three major ride-hailing services, Uber appears to suffer the most from a bad reputation, likely made worse by sexist ad campaigns and comments from its CEO. It offers almost exactly the same safety features as Lyft -- no cash, ride tracking -- but Lyft has more than twice the percentage of female drivers. Lyft has more female executives than Uber and still has each driver meet in-person with a "mentor" before giving rides, which could put them at ease. But it might be the less tangible things that count: one driver said she originally picked Lyft over Uber in part because of the company's pink branding, left over from Lyft's early days when it was briefly imagined as a ride service for women.
Uber's lack of women could also be self-reinforcing. "I wonder, 'Why are you only hiring men?'" said Leonda Irvin, a Shuddle driver who said she wouldn't feel safe driving for Uber. "It seems weird to me that there are no women."
How Do You Get A 99% Female Driver Workforce?
Two companies that don't have this problem are Shuddle and HopSkipDrive, startups that both launched in the last six months and have the same business model: driving children around when parents can't. They also say their driver workforces are more than 98% women.
The women-heavy driver pool is partly because of the nature of the services: they ask for caregiver experience, which means most qualified applicants are women, and some women said they feel safe around children but would never want to drive adults. But drivers also appreciated being able to schedule rides in advance and work mostly during the day, both things that adult-oriented services could implement or incentivize if they wanted to attract more women. HopSkipDrive was also founded by three mothers, which CEO Joanna McFarland said helps female drivers feel heard and understood.
Female drivers are essential to the startups' business, since many parents tell them they feel more comfortable putting their children in a car with a woman than a man. Parents already put teenagers in Ubers and Lyfts all the time, even though it's technically not allowed. If Uber, Lyft and Sidecar ever want to expand to drive around younger children, they'll need a different workforce to make it appealing.
For Allen, the Shuddle CEO, the best reward for having a mostly female workforce is being able to offer women a job when other ride-hailing services don't appeal to them.
"We get emails saying, 'You've saved my life this month. I couldn't make rent,'" he said. "It's not just men who have these problems."
