Uber and Lyft are confronting new legal threats from male drivers who said the companies’ women-only rider programs denied them thousands of dollars in earnings.
The litigation claims that rider preferences intended to match women and nonbinary passengers with non-male drivers constitute sex discrimination and violate the state’s civil rights protections.
What the lawsuits claim about driver exclusion and pay
Filed in California state court on behalf of a handful of plaintiffs, with the hope that they will become class actions, the cases argue that male drivers are dropped from a segment of the market whenever riders select women-only or non-male driver options. The lawsuits seek $4,000 in statutory damages per driver under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, claiming that hundreds of thousands of men on the platforms could be eligible if the class is certified.
The drivers maintain that the policies limit their access to high-demand hours and lucrative routes, thus reducing their earning potential. Their attorneys cast the tools as fundamentally categorical gatekeeping on the basis of sex, not a neutral safety measure; and say that a platform that dispatches rides like Lyft or Uber is a “business establishment,” and therefore barred from such discrimination.
Centered on safety features offered by Uber and Lyft
Uber has recently launched an option in which women riders can request, or express a preference for, drivers who are women (or anyone other than male), when such drivers are available. Lyft’s Women+ Connect also connects women and nonbinary riders to female drivers who opt in. Both companies present the tools as optional, designed to help riders and drivers feel safer.
The effect is something that men who drive report noticing: When women filter for non-male drivers, the market of potential riders shrinks for men. Because ride-hail drivers are predominantly men, at even a small change in desired-match criteria, these kinds of wait times, acceptance rates and pay go out the window. Driver survey platforms consistently report that men represent a strong majority of ride-hail drivers, thereby multiplying any effects of gender-based filters.
Legal stakes under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act
California’s Unruh Act generally prohibits businesses from discriminating on the basis of sex, among other protected classes. State Supreme Court precedent has invalidated gender-based promotions and access rules in the past, emphasizing that well-meaning policies can still be unlawful if they ultimately frustrate equal service. At the same time, courts have siphoned out a limited space for privacy and safety concerns under certain narrow circumstances.
Legal experts say the key question is whether a platform can defend women-only ride matching as a necessary, narrowly tailored safety measure. The companies can say the features are opt-in, do not block men from the service wholesale and respond to documented risks. The plaintiffs argue that the statutory bar is precisely the sort of “categorical exclusion in dispatch” forbidden by the statute.
Conservative advocacy groups too have weighed in, saying the programs violate federal civil rights protections for public accommodation. Whether those federal provisions directly apply to app-based marketplaces — and how the overlays between them and state law will work — is likely to be watched quite closely.
Pressure from safety records and assault reports
Those safety features didn’t materialize in a vacuum. Uber’s latest U.S. safety report recorded thousands of sexual assaults over a two-year period, and an investigation by a leading newspaper found that reports of the type of conduct were widespread across Uber’s platform over several years on hundreds of thousands of trips. Lyft has been accused of similar behavior in court and media reports.
Women riders have long reported altering what had been common travel habits — not taking late-night rides, sharing live locations with loved ones, or even abandoning ride-hail altogether — because of safety concerns. Women drivers, meanwhile, have complained of harassment and attacks on the road, especially when driving overnight shifts. Safety advocates have repeatedly asked platforms to provide a greater degree of control, such as identity-based matching options, panic buttons, more thorough checks on users’ past behavior and quicker incident response.
Both companies have defended their toolkits as rider- and driver-led choices rather than a blanket ban, and have said participation is voluntary where it exists. But the lawsuits challenge whether that framing is sufficient under California’s laws.
What it means for the gig economy and safety design
If the plaintiffs win, platforms could be pressured to eliminate identity-based matching or reconfigure it around neutral factors — like a “safety mode” that matches riders and drivers without knowledge of sex, but only based on who has passed background checks or whose previous trip ratings indicate they’re safe. A loss for the plaintiffs might encourage more narrowly tailored safety tools, and expansion to other markets.
Both would demand a reckoning with a central tension in on-demand markets: how to actually mitigate risk without creating new inequality. Transparent safety-outcome audits, independent oversight and clear opt-in controls for riders and drivers will be essential to convincing the courts — not to mention the public — that any solution is effective and fair.
For now, the cases highlight a larger tug-of-war with consequences that go well beyond the world of ride-hailing: when safety and civil rights come into conflict, who should bear the price of resolving them — and what design choices really keep people safe without shutting others out of economic opportunity?
