Lyft believes this new initiative will help increase the number of women who want to drive for the company.
Ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber have transformed the transportation industry, but some of the issues women had with the old system are still prevalent.
To assuage the anxiety of some riders, Lyft announced it is launching a feature that prioritizes matching women and non-binary drivers with riders who are also women.
In 2022, Uber released data showing that there were nearly 1,000 sexual assaults — including 141 rape reports — throughout its system in 2020.
Despite Uber’s claims of heavily vetting its drivers, the company received reports of 3,824 of the five most severe categories of sexual assault — which according to CNN range from “non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to “non-consensual sexual penetration,” or rape — between 2019 and 2020.
It’s enough to make someone think twice about using a service that is designed to be used when a person can’t drive — often because they are intoxicated — late at night.
