SafeHer: A Ridesharing Service Made for Women By Women

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Safety continues to serve as a big deterrent for women riding in—and, more importantly, driving with—ridesharing apps. While services like Uber and Lyft continue to function, there are significantly different experiences for men and women riders and drivers.

Recently, an Uber driver was accused of raping a woman he picked up at a bar in Orange County, California. It’s just one of many cases that discourages women from riding and driving for similar services. Women often become the subject of attacks and harassment on both the driving and riding side of things.

Previously known as Chariot for Women, SafeHer garnered significant attention from multiple news outlets for its unique model. The service wants to focus on improving this situation for women by hiring women drivers (or drivers who identify as female) to pick up women passengers. The service also wants to allow children to ride, guaranteeing car seats in each SafeHer vehicle.

Michael Pelletz first thought of the idea after starting to drive for Uber himself. He discussed the idea with his wife—Kelly Pelletz, President of SafeHer—who admitted that she would feel uncomfortable driving for Uber because of safety issues.

“It’s a sad statement but there is such a need for what we’re doing,” said Michael Pelletz. “It’s resonating worldwide. So it’s just going to continue to grow. We will leapfrog Uber sooner than later because they never saw the big picture when it came to safety and as you see all over the news, they’re getting hurt by that.”

Since its initial announcement, SafeHer experience an overwhelming response from women interested in using, and working for, the service.

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“I only started this company ten weeks ago and my goal when I first started was to have a thousand drivers in Boston as of April 19,” says Pelletz. “And I would’ve started in Boston and gone to different cities and just seen how it grew. But within two weeks of me starting this business, we were all over the world.”

Now, Pelletz hopes to launch the service on a much larger scale, expanding to more U.S. cities but also “at least four or five other countries.” As Pelletz mentioned, Japanese media recently interviewed him and his wife, despite the fact that Uber is currently banned in Japan.

Since starting SafeHer, Pelletz has spoken with law enforcement officials, drivers and passengers (some during his own Uber routes) to form a distinct plan for a safer ridesharing service. He wants to set up call centers for any customer service issues. The app also includes unique safety features. For starters, a driver must answer a security question (which changes daily) to confirm her identity. Both riders and drivers see a unique word on their screens when the service gets confirmed. Before the passenger gets in the car, both she and the driver can confirm the word to make sure the ride is correct.

SafeHer also gives riders the chance to donate a portion of the fee from the ride to a charity of their choice with the listed charities change each month.

“What I’m most excited about is how many millions of people we are going to be able to help across the globe,” said Pelletz. “If you see, we give two percent of every single fare back to charities worldwide. That is something that companies don’t do.”

One big hurdle SafeHer must tackle lies in its hiring process; as some publications and legal figures have pointed out, restricting employees to only women could violate laws around discrimination.

SheTaxis, a NYC-based app that has yet to launch (Paste recently searched for the app in the Apple Store with no results) struggled with the same obstacle. According to the Boston Globe, the service (also known as SheRides) “faced questions from regulators” in 2014. Currently, the service focuses on NYC and recently posted a survey to Facebook asking users what cities they should expand to next.

SafeHer hasn’t shied away from this discrimination issue. According to The Washington Post, the company’s general counsel Chase Liu cited “privacy interests” as a possible justification for the hiring of only female drivers.

For now, the company’s main focus is making sure that its technology can handle the influx of traffic from a purely practical standpoint. But for Pelletz, the real goal lies in finding a way for women to feel safer. He hopes other companies mimic their model so that the safety issue will eventually become non-existent.

“There’s so many exciting parts,” says Pelletz. “To really to be able to put so many women back to work who have really wanted to driver for Uber but have been afraid. To have a safe way to work and be comfortable and make some extra money which not only helps them, [SafeHer drivers] but also their families and the world economy, too.”