New York City riders opened their Uber apps this spring to find a new option waiting for them: the ability to request a female driver. The feature, part of Uber’s Women Preferences program, went live across the country on March 9, 2026, landing in New York alongside other major cities including Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Atlanta. For women navigating the city’s sprawling for-hire vehicle network, the option represents a meaningful shift in how they can choose to move through the five boroughs. But the rollout is arriving against a stark backdrop — New York’s rideshare industry is overwhelmingly male, and the numbers make clear that demand for the feature is likely to outpace its availability.
What the Feature Does and How It Works
Women Preferences gives women riders and drivers the choice to ride with other women. Riders can request a trip on demand by selecting the Women Drivers option when ordering a ride; if the wait time runs longer than expected, they can opt for a standard ride with a faster pickup instead.
Women drivers, for their part, can toggle a setting in the app to receive trip requests only from women — including during peak earning hours. The feature also extends to teen accounts, where teens and their guardians can request women drivers for both on-demand rides and advance reservations.
The program was first launched in five pilot cities in August 2025, then expanded to 60 U.S. cities by year end before going nationwide in March 2026. Globally, Women Preferences has been used for more than 230 million trips worldwide and is available for drivers in more than 40 countries and for riders in seven, including the United States, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Brazil, and Spain.
The origins of the feature trace back further than the U.S. pilots. The concept first emerged in 2019 after women in Saudi Arabia gained the right to drive, and Uber launched an early version of Women Preferences in that country before it evolved into a broader global product.
NYC Tests the Feature — And Finds It Works, With Caveats
When NY1 put the feature to the test in New York City, the women-preference option in the app returned a female driver within about three minutes. That’s a promising result in isolation. The longer-term question is whether that kind of availability holds as more riders begin using the feature consistently — and the city’s driver demographics suggest it may not always be so seamless.
Out of more than 178,000 Taxi and Limousine Commission-licensed drivers in New York, only about 6% — or nearly 11,000 — are women. That figure, drawn from TLC data, makes New York’s female driver share one of the lowest of any major U.S. market. The national picture isn’t dramatically different: only 15% to 18% of rideshare drivers in the U.S. are women, a proportion that decreases further during overnight hours due to safety concerns.
Uber acknowledged the gap. The company said pilot wait times were “not very different” from standard UberX rides, but declined to provide specific figures, and said it does not yet have data to share on whether the pilots boosted women driver recruitment or retention. The feature is designed to address that in part — by making the platform more attractive to women who might otherwise avoid driving at certain hours or in certain conditions — but the pipeline problem will take time to resolve even if the feature drives new interest.
The Safety Case Behind the Demand
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The Women Preferences expansion did not arrive in a neutral environment. This year, two women who accused Uber drivers of sexual assault won judgements against the company — one for $8 million dollars. Uber has said publicly that reports of safety incidents on the platform have declined in recent years, but the company’s own framing of Women Preferences centers on rider feedback about comfort and control rather than any specific incident-driven response.
Brooke Anderson, Uber’s Head of Product Communications, stated that the feature exists because women asked for it. That framing — rooted in user demand rather than safety crisis management — shapes how the company has positioned the rollout, though the two motivations are not mutually exclusive for riders making the choice.
For drivers like Veronica Martinez, who has been behind the wheel for Uber and Lyft for eleven years, the calculus is personal. Martinez said she always worries about her safety, but noted that TLC drivers in New York are required to pass criminal background checks, submit to annual drug tests, and be fingerprinted — a layer of accountability she believes makes the city’s for-hire network meaningfully safer than in other markets. Martinez added that she does not limit her passengers to women and prefers to give everyone a chance.
A Shifting Leadership Picture at the TLC
The Uber feature rollout is landing at a moment of notable change in how New York’s for-hire vehicle industry is governed. Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Midori Valdivia to lead the Taxi and Limousine Commission in January 2026, making her the fourth woman to serve as commissioner and chair in the agency’s 55-year history.
Valdivia’s arrival comes as TLC data shows the share of trips completed by women drivers is growing incrementally, and as women have begun occupying more leadership and advocacy roles across the industry’s various associations and base operators. Valdivia noted that female licensees “make up some of the safest drivers and most conscientious base operators” in the system, and expressed commitment to addressing on-the-job barriers that women drivers face — including access to parking spaces for bathroom breaks and personal safety concerns on the road.
Legal Challenges Add Complexity
Not everyone in the industry has welcomed the feature. Two drivers filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that the Women Preferences feature discriminates against men, claiming it reinforces a gender stereotype and leaves male drivers contending for a smaller pool of customers. Similar lawsuits have been filed in California by male Uber and Lyft drivers who claim the feature will reduce their ride volume. Uber has pushed back against the discrimination framing, arguing in court filings that the program serves a recognized public policy interest in enhancing safety and rider choice.
The legal challenge reflects a real tension in how the feature operates: it creates a preference-based matching system in a marketplace that has historically treated all licensed drivers as interchangeable. How courts ultimately weigh rider safety interests against driver earning concerns will have implications well beyond New York.
What Comes Next
Uber has indicated the Women Preferences rollout is not a finished product. The company says it plans to continue expanding and refining the feature as it gathers feedback from riders and drivers globally, with the aim of increasing safety, choice, and flexibility for women on the platform.
For New York City, the immediate work is practical: a feature that allows women to request women drivers is only as useful as the number of women available to accept those requests. With female drivers completing roughly 6% of monthly TLC trips, the gap between what the feature promises and what it can reliably deliver will remain a live issue throughout the year. The city’s rideshare workforce has long been shaped by economic necessity, safety calculus, and the particular rhythms of New York’s streets — and changing its gender composition will require more than a toggle in an app.
What Women Preferences does accomplish is making the choice visible, and placing it in the hands of the people most affected. Whether that visibility translates into a meaningfully different experience for the millions of women who take Uber rides across the five boroughs each month remains to be seen — but the option is now on the table, and New York is watching closely.
