Lyft Women+ Connect: Gender-Based Rider-Driver Matching in the US Gig Economy

Women make up nearly half of Lyft's riders but only about 23% of its drivers, a gap Lyft attributes partly to safety concerns; the platform had also disclosed over 4,000 sexual-assault-related incidents on rides between 2017 and 2019 in mandated safety reports, followed by a 2022 $25 million shareholder settlement over allegedly concealed safety issues.

Launched in September 2023 in five early-access US cities (Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose) and expanded nationwide by early 2024, Women+ Connect is an opt-in preference: drivers and riders who enable it are prioritised for matching with other women or nonbinary users, though a match is not guaranteed and users may still be paired with men. The feature works both ways, matching women/nonbinary riders with women/nonbinary drivers.

Lyft reports that 67% of eligible drivers opted into the feature, and that those who did kept it on 99% of the time - a real, quantified adoption signal independently covered by NPR and Axios. The Human Rights Campaign welcomed the feature's explicit inclusion of nonbinary drivers and riders alongside women.

However, NPR reported in September 2023 that Lyft declined to share updated ride-safety data or confirm whether assault rates fell after the feature's launch. So, unlike programmes with an externally co-published outcome study, Women+ Connect's core safety rationale remains evidenced only by adoption and usage statistics, not by an independent evaluation of whether it achieved its stated safety goal.

Read the full analysis: https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/women-plus-connect