Meet the women helping to make ridesharing safer
At Uber, female leaders are leveraging professional expertise and personal experience to help make the platform more secure
At Uber, female leaders are leveraging professional expertise and personal experience to help make the platform more secure
By WP BrandStudio
Rebecca Payne fully grasped the importance of her new job as a safety product manager at Uber while standing on a roadside in Malaysia. Recently hired by the ridesharing company, Payne was taking a few months off to backpack through Southeast Asia. Her travels had put her in some precarious situations; a bus driver in Laos, for example, wanted to drop her in the middle of highway traffic. Yet it was while struggling to find a ride in an unfamiliar country that she truly started to connect the dots on the difference that accessible and reliable transit options can make.
Two years later, Payne is now part of a diverse cast of Uber employees striving to deliver safety solutions. The holistic interventions range from designing transparent community guidelines to bolstering 24-hour-a-day incident response. And women have been a key part of this effort. These leaders—three of whom, including Payne, are profiled below—have not only brought their professional expertise, but also their personal experiences to bear in the effort to implement a comprehensive set of initiatives aimed at helping to keep women safe.
From pain points to new policies
It wasn’t that Payne didn’t already have an appreciation for transportation safety before her travels abroad. In fact, Uber’s focus on safety is part of what drew her to the company. “I remember when ridesharing services were just starting in San Francisco and I thought it was a crazy idea,” Payne said. “But we’ve obviously seen that Uber has really transformed transportation around the world. And the only way it can really have that impact is to help make sure that everyone feels safe.”
Since joining the company, Payne has helped launch a variety of safety features, including one that can notify drivers if they’re going faster than the speed limit and an alert for riders in many cities if they’re exiting near a bike lane. Her wider team is responsible for building core safety features for both drivers and riders, such as an in-app 911 emergency button and technology that anonymizes users’ contact details when connecting through the Uber app.
When developing these new safety features, the team starts by talking with users to understand the various pain points, Payne explained. From there, it’s a collaborative effort between Uber’s designers, researchers and product engineers, among others, to devise and develop solutions to help address users’ concerns.
“It’s my job to bring these disparate teams together, to make sure that we’re all talking to each other and working toward the same goal,” she said.
One product Payne said she was particularly proud to launch earlier this year was a feature in Saudi Arabia that allowed female drivers to set a preference to only pick up female passengers.
“Only recently, women in Saudi Arabia were finally granted the right to drive and we wanted to empower them to start driving with Uber. But we also wanted to be sensitive to the local context—and having men and women in enclosed spaces together is not necessarily the norm in Saudi Arabia if they’re not related,” she said.
“It was really exciting to launch that feature to help them to feel comfortable on the platform.”
Bringing empathy to incident response
Since she graduated with a master’s degree in social work, empathy has been one of Sarah Schol’s guiding principles. She spent twelve years in behavioral health, first as a crisis counselor working directly with people experiencing serious mental health crises. She soon realized, however, that she had a passion for operations and management. She moved to a supervisory role, supporting other crisis counselors and helping them navigate the complex and often emotionally draining work environment.
That background continues to inform her work in critical safety response at Uber. She leads a team of safety support agents who review and respond to safety incidents that occur in the company’s realm. They are often the first Uber point-of-contact for anyone reporting a safety incident or issue. Schol said her background makes her very supportive of her team’s focus on responding appropriately and empathetically to those who reach out.
“Some of my most valuable experiences came from opportunities as a crisis counselor to just sit with somebody who had a traumatic experience and figure out the best way to support them and connect them with the necessary resources to move forward,” she said. “I’ve experienced firsthand how important it is to get it right when someone is seeking that type of support. That makes the work that we do in safety very meaningful to me.”
To help meet this goal, Uber has doubled down on building out a trained incident response team. It includes employees with a background in investigations or the behavioral health field—for example, people who have worked in claims, law enforcement or child protective services. Everyone goes through training to ensure they have the skills needed to do the job effectively.
Schol said these efforts help ensure her team’s response work is not only meticulous, but also empathetic.
“As a woman, regardless of where I am, my safety is always top of mind. I don’t take it for granted, whether I’m in a parking garage or an elevator or on a run—and I think that’s a similar experience for many women out there,” she said.
“If something were to happen during a ride with Uber, it matters to me that other women would get a sensitive response when they talk to my team.”
Building trust in the process
At Uber, safety takes many forms. And many of them involve policies, not products. That’s where Danielle Sheridan, head of safety and standards for U.S. and Canada operations, comes in. “Our team has two main missions,” she said. “The first is to help improve safety among riders and drivers who use the app. And the second is to create and maintain the standards that we use to run the business.”
Uber’s Community Guidelines, which outline expected behavior for users, are a prominent example. Over the past year, Sheridan’s team has played a key role in the refresh of the guidelines, making them simpler and clearer. A summary of the standards now appears in the app so users can easily see them.
“Respect is a two-way street,” Sheridan said. “It’s important that both drivers and riders are following our community guidelines.”
At the same time, Sheridan’s team is responsible for developing and implementing policies to respond to sexual harassment and misconduct. Uber has partnered with organizations such as RAINN (the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center to help make sure Uber’s safety practices “raise the bar for the industry as a whole,” Sheridan said. Uber also pledged $5 million over five years to support the work of partner organizations focused on prevention.
For Sheridan, these initiatives are personal. “No industry is immune to safety issues, including ours. I’m so passionate about helping solve safety problems at Uber that have such a broad societal impact,” she said. “For instance, as a woman, I think about myself, my mom, my grandmother and my friends using the app, and I want to do everything I can to help make sure that they are safe when requesting a ride with Uber.”
Women are at the forefront of Uber’s efforts to help keep riders and drivers safe. Learn more.
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