When women drive—and ride

Female drivers are safer—at least for female riders. That’s what ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft have discovered in their attempts to respond to customer demand for sex-specific rideshare options. Lyft launched a nationwide program in 2024 that would prioritize matching women as well as nonbinary riders and drivers, while Uber’s women-only ridesharing option expanded nationally in March. These options come amid increasing scrutiny of the general safety of ridesharing apps.

Between 2017 and 2019, for instance, Lyft recorded “4,158 sexual assaults and 10 fatal physical assaults” involving passengers as well as drivers, as detailed in the company’s first safety report. In Lyft’s second “Safety Transparency Report” covering 2020-2022 there were 23 fatal physical assaults, and 2,651 reported sexual assaults. In its latest report, Uber documented 36 fatal assaults and 2,717 instances of sexual assault from 2021-2022. Lyft’s reports do not provide data broken down along gender lines, but Uber’s report does note that in at least certain kinds of cases women were 10 times more likely to be reported as the targets of sexual assault than men.

These programs are couched in terms of both safety and comfort, the latter presumably referring to the perceived threats that men represent. Given both the facts of the assault data provided by Lyft and Uber as well as the broader realities that men are far more likely to assault women sexually than the reverse, these motives and options seem reasonable. Some, perhaps many, women would feel safer as a passenger in a rideshare vehicle with a female driver. And the marketplace is a venue where customer demand is most likely to be met.

There are, however, some predictable factors that make something as common-sense as a “women-only ride preference” more complicated, and much of it has to do with legal discrimination. Male drivers in California have filed class-action suits against both Uber and Lyft, claiming economic as well as reputational harm. According to one lawsuit, men are “discriminated against and receive fewer and different rides than they otherwise would absent the policy.”

But the potential legal challenges not only have to do with economic discrimination, but with the nature of sex and gender in the law itself. Companies that want to create female-only spaces cannot avoid definitions of women and men. And there are significant potential legal consequences if a company chooses to allow drivers and riders to simply self-report their gender. So while Uber and Lyft are facing class action suits from male drivers, they will also undoubtedly face challenges when transgender persons who identify differently from their biological sex are involved in assaults.

During her confirmation hearings in 2022, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., to define the word “woman.” Judge Brown responded that she could not provide a definition because she was “not a biologist.” Judge Brown was subsequently confirmed and is now an associate justice of the Supreme Court. But where Justice Brown was allowed to escape the question, service providers like Uber and Lyft will have to make choices about whether to affirm the dogmas of gender ideology or whether to implement “women-only” policies that actually apply to women rather than to men.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with “women-only” spaces, from the Girls Scouts to women’s shelters to sports locker rooms. It remains to be seen whether an Uber ride can be a space where sex-selective policy can survive legal challenge. And at issue here will be not only the nature and definition of womanhood but also whether there are reasonable motives for discriminating on the basis of sex.

In a 2013 interview, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia distinguished between sex and race discrimination, pointing out that there are instances where the former might be reasonable while the latter is not. “There are some intelligent reasons to treat women differently,” said Scalia. “I don’t think anybody would deny that.” While that latter claim may have been self-evident in 2013, the same is not true in 2026. We not only are having serious and prolonged debates about the validity of women-only spaces and the reasonableness of sex discrimination in some cases, we are also in a context where the very definition of these realities is contested.

It seems reasonable that companies like Lyft and Uber would want to respond to the desires of some of their customers to have safer options. But these same companies cannot avoid defining the terms of these policies in ways that have significant moral as well as legal ramifications. We would do well to return to the wisdom of Justice Scalia’s long-time friend and colleague on the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote in 1996 that “physical differences between men and women ... are enduring,” citing an earlier case that “the two sexes are not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one [sex] is different from a community composed of both.”

Uber and Lyft have begun to recognize this creational reality, and we will see if the law is able to as well.