Uber wants 1 million female drivers

SAN FRANCISCO: Ride-hailing app Uber, under the microscope for a handful of driver assaults on passengers in some cities, pledged in a blog post yesterday to sign up 1 million female drivers around the world by 2020.

The ride service did not provide comparable figures for how many women drivers are now on the Uber service worldwide. In the US, about 14 percent of its 160 000 drivers are female, the company said. Uber said it adds thousands more drivers each month.

“Uber does not require (minimum) hours and it does not require a schedule,” Salle Yoo, Uber’s general counsel, said on Monday, referring to why women might find working for Uber attractive. “It offers the chance to be entrepreneurial, the chance to balance work and family.”

Female passengers will not yet have the ability to request female drivers, Yoo said. She emphasised the app’s safety features, including the notification of the driver’s identity received by customers on their phones beforehand, and the ability to share via text message an estimated arrival time with others.

The pledge comes as the rapidly expanding company deals with fallout over incidents of assaults by drivers from Boston and Chicago to Delhi.

The female driver initiative was timed to coincide with a UN gathering in New York last night to celebrate women’s rights, at which Yoo will speak. Uber is partnering with the UN on its million-women driver goal.

Uber screens drivers, including the use of background checks that vary from country to country. It does not hire drivers as full-time employees. Instead, it lets them use the smartphone-based app to connect them to passengers looking for a paid ride and takes a cut of the fare. – Reuters