Uber's women-only option goes nationwide in the US

NEW YORK (AP) — Uber launched a feature Monday to allow both women riders and drivers across the U.S. to be matched with other women for trips, expanding a pilot program aimed at addressing concerns about the safety of its riding-hailing platform.

The new feature is being rolled out nationwide despite an ongoing class action lawsuit against the policy in California, filed by Uber drivers who argue that it is discriminatory against men. Rival ride-hailing company Lyft is also facing a discrimination lawsuit over a similar offering that it introduced nationwide in 2024.

The feature, announced in a blog post, allows women to request a female driver through an option on the app called “Women Drivers.” Passengers can opt for another ride if the wait for a woman is too long, and they can also reserve a trip with a woman driver in advance. A third option allows female users to set a preference for a woman driver in their app settings, which would increase the chances of being matched with a female driver, though it would not guarantee it. Uber is also allowing its teen account users to request women drivers.

Uber's women drivers can set the app's preferences to request trips with female riders, and they can turn off that preference at anytime.

Uber, based in San Francisco, says about one-fifth of its drivers in the U.S. are women, thought the ratio varies by city.

Two California Uber drivers filed a class-action lawsuit against Uber in November, arguing that its Women Preferences feature violates California’s Unruh Act, which prohibits sex discrimination by business enterprises. The lawsuit charges that the feature gives its minority female drivers access to the entire pool of passengers, while leaving its majority male drivers to compete for a smaller pool of passengers. The lawsuit also argues that Uber’s policy “reinforces the gender stereotype that men are more dangerous than women.”

Uber filed a motion to compel arbitration in the case, citing an agreement the plaintiffs signed when joining the app as drivers. In the motion, Uber disputed that its new feature violates the Unruh Act, saying it “serves a strong and recognized public policy interest in enhancing safety.”

“This feature is a common sense solution to a long-standing request from both women Drivers and Riders who told Uber they would feel more comfortable and safer if they could choose to ride with another woman,” the company said in the court filing.

Two Lyft drivers have filed a similar lawsuit against that company against its “Women+Connect” feature, which allows women and nonbinary riders to match with drivers of the same identification.

Uber piloted the “Women Preferences” feature in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit last summer and expanded it to 26 U.S. cities in November. The company first launched a version of the feature in Saudi Arabia in 2019 following the country's landmark law granting women the right to drive. It now offers similar options in 40 other countries, including Canada and Mexico.

Both Uber and Lyft have for years faced criticism over their safety records, including thousands of reports of sexual assaults from both passengers and drivers. In February, federal jury found Uber to be legally responsible in a 2023 case of sexual assault and the company was ordered to pay $8.5 million to an Arizona woman who said she was raped by one of its drivers.

Uber maintains that because its drivers are contractors and not employees, it’s not liable for their misconduct. But Uber says has taken multiple steps in efforts to improve safety, including teaming up with Lyft in 2021 to create a database of drivers ousted from their ride-hailing services for complaints over sexual assault and other crimes.

Uber says sexual assault reports have decreased over the years. According to reports from Uber, 5,981 incidents of sexual assault were reported in U.S. rides between 2017 and 2018 — compared to 2,717 between 2021 and 2022 (the latest years with data available), which the platform says represented 0.0001% of total trips nationwide.

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

FILE - An Uber sign is displayed at the company's headquarters, in San Francisco, Sept. 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

FILE - In this March 15, 2017, file photo, a sign marks a pickup point for the Uber car service at LaGuardia Airport in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

BERLIN (AP) — Chancellor Friedrich Merz's party has made a disappointing start to a year packed with German state elections, suffering a narrow defeat in an important industrial region after a prominent candidate powered the environmentalist Greens to a come-from-behind victory.

Merz said Monday that his federal government, which has struggled to get Germany’s stagnant economy moving, will have to “manage more, and more substantially, in terms of the necessary reforms so that we in Germany can get out of this difficult economic situation.” The country has Europe's biggest economy.

Merz's center-right Christian Democratic Union was long confident of winning back the governor's office in Baden-Württemberg, a region of more than 11 million people in southwestern Germany that is home among many other companies to automakers Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. The country's first and so far only Green governor, Winfried Kretschmann, is retiring after 15 years in charge of a traditional conservative heartland.

A CDU victory long looked likely despite the unpopularity of the 10-month-old national government. But the party's poll lead shrank ahead of Sunday's election thanks to a Green campaign focused on Cem Özdemir, a longtime federal lawmaker and former German agriculture minister.

Final results Monday showed the Greens taking 30.2% of the vote, just ahead of the CDU with 29.7% — a gain compared with five years ago but not enough for victory. The far-right, anti-migration Alternative for Germany nearly doubled its support to 18.8%, reflecting its gains in last year's national election. Merz's partners in the federal government, the center-left Social Democrats, lost half their support to poll an embarrassing 5.5%.

Özdemir, 60, touted his experience and leaned hard into the Greens' relatively conservative image in Baden-Württemberg — a contrast with the party's more left-wing approach nationally, where it is in opposition.

His 37-year-old CDU opponent, Manuel Hagel, was much less well-known and probably wasn't helped by a video from 2018 posted recently by a Green federal lawmaker in which Hagel talked about a visit to a school and a female student's “fawn-brown eyes.”

The two parties are expected to govern Baden-Württemberg together, as they have in a coalition for the past 10 years, with Özdemir as Germany's first state governor with Turkish roots. Merz underlined mainstream parties' refusal to ally with Alternative for Germany, or AfD, reiterating that “we will not work together with this party. Period.”

Sunday's was the first of five state elections this year. The next, on March 22 in neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, pits the national governing parties against each other. It has been led since 1991 by the Social Democrats, who are in a tight race with Merz's CDU for first place.

In September, there are elections in Berlin and two regions in the ex-communist east, where AfD is particularly strong and hopes to get its first state governor.

Merz conceded that Sunday's wafer-thin defeat was a “bitter result,” though he pointed to his party's gains and the fact that it has the same number of seats in the state legislature in Stuttgart as the Greens. He congratulated Özdemir on a “personal victory” which, he argued, he won by distancing himself from the national Greens.

Merz argued that his government has done a lot to deliver on its promises, though “it's not yet enough,” and that there's a lot of support for “what I am doing at present in foreign and European policy.”

Merz, who has visited Washington and Beijing in the past two weeks, has sometimes drawn criticism for spending a lot of time on foreign policy.

“His foreign policy presence may be really good, but he can only gain popularity and the federal CDU can only gain in polls if things go better domestically,” Uwe Jun, a political science professor at the University of Trier, told Phoenix television.

“He needs significant improvements in the area of social and economic policy,” Jun said.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attends the cabinet meeting at the chancellery at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, March 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Cem Özdemir (Alliance 90/The Greens), top candidate in the Baden-Württemberg state elections, makes a gesture at his party's election party and stretches up the little finger of his right hand, in Stuttgart, Germany, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (Bernd Weißbrod/dpa via AP)