Empowering Safe Rides: An Engineering-Product Collaboration in LatAm

In a move to enhance rider safety and a testament to the power of cross-team collaboration, Uber introduced the Women Rider Preference feature in 2019 in Saudi Arabia. One of the key partnerships in expanding this innovative initiative to Brazil and ensuring it remains successful to this day was between Celeste, a dynamic member of the product team, and Christian, a resourceful engineer. Their partnership with each other and a variety of teams across Uber epitomized our commitment to leveraging diverse expertise to drive meaningful change. Celeste’s deep understanding of user experience and market needs combined with Christian’s technical prowess and problem-solving skills helped bring this feature to life in Brazil resulting in a more comfortable ride experience for women. This story is not just about a new feature; it’s about how collaboration, innovation, and a shared vision for safety can create impactful solutions in the tech world.

Celeste: I am a Senior Program Manager at Uber’s Brazil Tech Center focused on safety. In the past 7 years at Uber, I’ve grown across process, operations, and now product management, where I help drive safety and inclusion across our platform. Currently, I work in product development and implement safety solutions tailored to the user community across the different countries where Uber operates.

Chris: I was born and raised in São Paulo in the suburban zone of Capao Redondo. I joined Uber as a Software Engineer, and after 3 years, I was promoted to Engineering Manager leading a team focused on user security tools.

Celeste and Chris: The Women Rider Preference feature allows women and non-binary registered driver-partners to express the preference to only receive trip requests from women riders when they are online with the Uber app. This can give earners extra peace of mind when driving during peak earning hours, such as in the evening. Empowering them with more confidence to earn anytime, anywhere, and allowing them to improve their earning opportunities.

Celeste: A group of female Uber employees brought questions about barriers for female earners to light. In response, we created an internal work group and conducted external surveys to understand key barriers to women’s use of the platform for income generation.

One of the reasons preventing more women from signing up is safety. Women earners who already drive on the platform have shared that during certain times of the day, felt uncomfortable picking up male riders and logging off earlier than they would like to pursue their financial goals. 

Chris: The disparity between the number of male and female drivers on the platform has been one of the top areas for my team to counteract. Personally, one of the things that inspired me about this project was the impact that it could have in creating financial independence for women.

Celeste: The feature is available to the earner community in more than 30 countries, 16 of them in Latin America. We launched in Brazil in 2019 and over 50 million rides have been completed using it, and between 6 PM and 12 AM is the time when usage is highest.

Chris: Our research has found that this functionality has been highly appreciated, especially with drivers new to the platform. It allows female earners more time to earn and creates less hesitation around certain areas.

Celeste: This is one of the projects I’m most proud to have contributed to here at Uber. As a woman, I know what it’s like to be safety conscious and to be on the lookout for potential risks on a daily basis that a man might not have to consider. This is not just a personal perception but is also backed by data from the Agência Patrícia Gal paper (2023) in Brazil, showing that 97% of women are afraid of experiencing some form of violence or harassment while moving around the city they live in.

This survey also shows that 58% of those surveyed said they are excited and relieved when they are picked up by rideshare cars driven by women. In this way, if the tool allows for women drivers to be more comfortable while using the app, it naturally has a positive impact on women riders, like myself.

That’s why as a rider and an Uber employee, I understand that women and non-binary drivers should have this option when using our platform. There is still a long way to go when it comes to gender equity, but it’s clear that the beginning is having a diverse environment and being open to listening to new perspectives.

Chris: Equity is very important to me, and it’s very important to have the opportunity to work on a project at Uber that can help promote equity.

Celeste: A project like this has an infinite number of complex points, and I could speak for hours about all the exciting challenges we face every day. One critical point that we established from the beginning was the need to respect the gender identity of everyone on our platform. In Brazil and most other Latin American countries, a driver’s license and official documents do not necessarily reflect the gender identity of our earners, as most do not have the option of transgender or other non-binary identities.

This is why we created a section within our privacy settings in the app, where earners and riders can update this information based on their gender identity, which can be different from their official documents. Based on this change, mechanisms have also been put in place to verify these statements contributing to the reliability and effectiveness of pairings. We wanted to ensure that every part of this process was simple and did not embarrass the person editing their profile. With this in mind, we were able to build an integration with a major electronic signature and digital contract company within the app itself, where drivers can complete a formal gender self-identification statement even before going through their data verification to access the tool.

Celeste: Yes – Being in Brazil helped us understand the true demand and the reality of the need which encouraged us to develop the solution faster. We have experiences with other women-only public transportation efforts in Brazil and other LatAm countries, such as gender-specific trains. This helped meet the public demand and acceptance for similar initiatives.

Celeste: It involved a ton of people from many different countries. Rebecca Payne, one of our product managers based in the United States, was the lead for this project and had a huge role to play in helping to define the final solution, specifically building the ability to obtain gender identity information that I explained above.

Chris: Making sure the product had additional security steps in the process without cutting into the platform experience for users was critical. We engaged a lot of teams internally to do this––fulfillment, legal, safety, privacy, and operations.

Celeste: The close work between product and engineering was essential to ensure the solution was effectively built. For example, the design and engineering teams partnered to build an easy-to-use user interface. The teamwork on this project was important to ensure high usability for the onboarding, from charging time to screen design. 

Another extremely critical thing was how this collaboration helped us see and develop the backend for the product. On this project, specifically, our ability to collect and organize eligibility data would not have been possible without both teams working together. While the product team provided a larger view, ensuring that the solution was aligned with the business objectives — following all the privacy, inclusion, and usability recommendations – the engineering team provided a technical view of the best ways to achieve this. These supplemental perspectives and specialties contributed to a consistent product architecture that can be leveraged for launch in many markets across the globe without requiring any additional development efforts.

Chris: Our Product and Engineering teams have collaborated intensively since the project started, especially because we had to tweak the product as we launched in different regions and countries. It was common before expanding to a region to have a lot of conversations with the local operations team, understand the nuances of that area, and come back with product and engineering solutions to adapt or include some additional safety mechanisms for women drivers. Brazil, as the first major market we launched, was key in testing the features that were requested in our various focus groups. Collaborating with Operations was also critical to our success.

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