Hi, I'm your host, Kudrat Wadhwa, and you're listening to the Tuesday Special of The Signal Brief, where we interview leaders from across industries shaping modern consumption.

We'll be pausing the Tuesday episodes from now, but do tune in to our Friday episodes, which you can find on all streaming platforms.

Today's guest is Sooraj Nair. He’s the Director of Safety Operations at Uber.

We spoke about the challenge of women's safety in cabs and what Uber is doing to fix them.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kudrat (Host): So, my first question is, if we go back 10 years, so that would be 2014, 2016, what did women's safety in cabs look like at that time? What were some of the challenges?

Sooraj: So if you look at 10 years from then, if you look at what's happening right now, today we are going above and beyond what our regulatory and our consumer expectations are, and we are embedding safety in every single decision that we take at Uber. Safety today is something that we are constantly pushing the boundary on and we are constantly bringing new innovative tech solutions to improve safety outcomes on our platform.

That's the first lens that I wanted to throw some light on. The second lens is the technology lens. Over the last 10 years, because of technology, we have been able to focus on user safety and especially women's safety in ways before, during and after each trip that was never possible in the past.

And even technology, I think there are a couple of caveats here, a couple of aspects here that one needs to be aware of. The first one is just the fact that the entire technological landscape has become a lot more sophisticated, a lot better. Like, for example, document verification and the entire digital document ecosystem that exists today, because of which doc fraud has largely been eliminated.

And then there are some technologies that companies have developed and companies have invested in over the years that are now giving us dividends. So Uber over the last several years has focused on investing in innovative safety technologies that have given us a lot of dividends over the years. And there's a second kind of technology that I just wanted to flag.

The third key lens that is important here is the movement from reactive systems to proactive systems. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that when in the past, we were focused on reacting to safety incidents, we were focused on ensuring safety support is extended.

When someone reaches out to us, someone reports a safety incident, while that still happens even today, I think we are today a lot more proactive in identifying trip anomalies and identifying issues on trips even before they have gotten surfaced to us. So all trips get monitored and all trips get assessed for any anomalous behaviour.

And even before the user reaches out to us, we believe that we need to reach out to the user to try and see if everything is going all right or not. So I think these are the three lenses which have actually shifted over the last 10 years on the women's safety front, which are quite significant.

Kudrat (Host): Okay, understood. And then you said that, for example, Uber keeps a track of all the rides and so on. But when it comes to measuring safety, how is it that you sort of keep track of safety?

How do you measure how safety has improved or increased among Uber rides?

Sooraj: So I think just one very important caveat here, feeling safe and actually being safe are related, but they are not exactly the same. On being safe, what we do is we track incident rates quite closely. Incidents on the platform, by the way, are extremely, extremely rare.

So we don't track incidents or incident rates as a percentage of total trips. We actually track incident rates against parts per million trips. So that's how rare incidents are.

And if you look at our incident rates across the last several years, the average incident rate for, let's say, the last 12 months for all safety incidents combined is at its lowest that it has ever been in the last several years. So that gives us a lot of confidence that we are trending in the right direction and the safety interventions that we have made are yielding dividends. The second key aspect is feeling safe.

And even on that, I think our safety perception remains quite strong. Here we rely on surveys and user research to try and figure out how users are feeling about the platform. And just two very interesting data points that I wanted to touch base on.

The first one is bike taxis are our single most and the fastest growing category of product within the Uber portfolio. And even within that product portfolio, I think the woman rider base is growing at a much higher pace as compared to the male rider base, which is a testament to how safe women riders feel in using two-wheelers on our platform. The second key aspect that I wanted to touch upon or the second data point that I wanted to touch upon was a recent report that we co-created with a global think tank, where it came to light that about 84% of women chose Uber because they felt that it was the safest choice to travel home after work.

So I think these are the kinds of data points that give us the confidence that we are making progress in the right direction and our safety interventions are working.

Kudrat (Host): Okay, got it. So, I understand that the number of incidents themselves has reduced a lot, especially if you compare it to how many rides that are happening. But at the same time, let's say I live in Delhi, for example.

And when it comes to taking any cab at night, whichever company it is, I mean, your family members, your friends, they're really worried about you. So, what will it take for the wider sort of societal perception around safety and cabs and women at night to change?

Sooraj: I think women's safety, honestly, is an ecosystem problem, not just a platform problem. While companies can invest in policies, processes and tech on their platform, the trip actually takes place in the physical real world. And there are problems. I'm not saying that there aren't. There are problems that can absolutely be solved by platforms.

And there is a limit of control that platforms have over how safety is experienced on the specific platform. But there are problems that far extend beyond what platforms are capable of, like, for example, the road infra, the street lighting, the emergency response systems that exist in a city, the broader societal attitudes toward women. These are all things that play a significant role in how women experience safety while they are on the road.

And our responsibility, we believe, is to make sure that the part of the ecosystem that we do control is made safer by working with governments, other companies, with civil society groups. And I think where I see the role of ride-hailing companies is in making sure that we are doing everything that we possibly can to remove any sort of safety concerns, any sort of uncomfortable situations that may come up while people are experiencing a trip, let's say late at night.

But just a side note, I think today for us, safety is a differentiator, which, what I'm trying to say is that safety on our platform is actually a lot better than some other platforms in the ride-hailing ecosystem.

But the reality is that we don't want safety to be a differentiator for us. We actually want safety to be an industry standard and for all the participants in the ride-hailing ecosystem to have the same standards on safety and not just Uber. And the reality is that perceptions of safety have a rub-off effect, which is to say that if you see that a certain safety incident has occurred on one platform, you may just assume that the same kind of safety incident might be possible on Uber as well.

And I think in a lot of cases, that assumption is incorrect. And that's the rub-off effect that eventually leads to this perception that the Uber platform also is not very safe and Uber is not doing a great job. I think that level of responsibility needs to be there with all the participants in the ride-hailing industry to ensure that they are doing their bit to further women's safety interests.

Kudrat (Host): Okay, understood. And then my next question is, one thing that would make women feel very safe is if the driver was a woman herself. So why is it that there are so few women drivers right now?

And is this something that Uber is actively working on? And if not, why not?

Sooraj: It's a great question. And honestly, again, it's a problem that's not just specific to Uber. I think this is an industry-wide problem.

The percentage of commercial women drivers in India today is at around 1%. And even on our platform, that number is very similar. So the first challenge that we need to solve is the systemic one where we need to have more women participation in the ride-hailing ecosystem as drivers.

And for that, we have partnered with NGOs, there are multiple work streams that are currently underway to just enable more women to participate in the ride-hailing ecosystem by making vehicle financing easier, by training them to be commercial drivers. So all that work is already happening. But I think the challenge here is that it's work that's going to be slow.

Because this is a systemic problem, you will not see improvements in a six-month or a one-year period. It's a multi-year problem that we are fully committed to solving and making progress on. But I think there are also safety challenges that prevent women from accessing ride-hailing platforms.

Like, for example, if a woman driver is taking a late-night trip at an isolated location, then the woman driver herself might feel uncomfortable. And that's where technological interventions that we have launched have really helped, like, for example, Woman Rider Preferred, which is a driver-facing product feature that we have launched for women drivers, which gives them confidence to drive in the evenings, in late hours, and actually improves participation of women drivers in the ride-hailing ecosystem.

And very quickly, what this product does is, when switched on, it will only pair women riders with women drivers, meaning that if a driver were to only want to have trips with women riders, if they are feeling uncomfortable about their safety, that is now possible on our platform.

And this is a huge hit amongst women drivers on our platform and something that is even today just exists on our platform. So these are the kinds of technological interventions that you also need to have in order to give women more confidence to get behind the wheel. So I think it's a two-pronged approach that we are following right now.

Progress is slow, but progress is steady. And we are fully committed to following through on this journey.

Kudrat (Host): Oh, got it. So I'll just ask one last question, which is, looking forward, say, two, three, four, five, 10 years, what do you want to change so that women feel safer in taking an Uber ride at night?

Sooraj: So if I were to take a very aspirational view of what the next five years could look like, I think companies today operate in silos and they have these walled gardens that have gotten created, and I don't think it's a great idea for something as important as safety to operate in silos.

So industry needs to actually come together to deter bad behaviour on the entire ride-hailing ecosystem. So, for example, why can't we have the same standards, the same punitive mechanisms to prevent unsafe users from accessing not just one platform, but all platforms? Another example is background verification.

So why can't we have the same standards for background verification? And just to give you some idea, Uber in the last one year, we had 60,000 drivers who applied to drive on our platform who didn't get through our background verification process because we found that there was an active or an ongoing or a past criminal conviction on their candidature. So these are the kinds of examples where we feel that a common industry standard is going to be really helpful.

The second key one, which I wanted to, and again, slightly aspirational, the second key initiative would be, can we think of a no-fly list equivalent in the ride-hailing ecosystem? If a user, whether it be rider or driver, has been deemed unsafe to participate in one ride-hailing platform, why would that information or why could that information not be shared across platforms? Because the same risks that exist from that user on one platform could also exist on other platforms as well.

So the question for us is, why can't industry participants come together to create a common list of unsafe users who have been barred from taking trips or completing trips on any platform? I think that would be something that we would be very keen on piloting. We would be very keen on thinking about.

The third thing, which is also going to be quite important, is how information flows between public systems and platforms. So today, the infra to share information seamlessly in real time between, let's say, a police department and platforms just doesn't exist. It's very fragmented and it's very difficult to get real-time information.

So can we have a mechanism where serious and relevant criminal driving history is made available to us real time if something were to happen in the physical world? Can we have real-time information on driving records and things like that? So we need to reduce the information asymmetry that exists between platforms and public systems.

That's the third one that's going to be very important. And lastly, I think safety has to be a baseline. I don't think safety should be a differentiator and all platforms need to aspire to follow the same standards and the same kind of controls that keep women safe.

If I were to look at the next five years, whether it be a rider or a driver, if a woman takes a trip across any platform and if she feels a lot safer in five years than what she does today, I think we would have done a great job.

Kudrat (Host): Thank you so much, Sooraj. Thanks for chatting with me.

Sooraj: Thanks for having me, Kudrat.

Kudrat (Host): That’s all for today.

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