Racial and Gender Discrimination in UberX and Lyft

The algorithms of UberX and Lyft racially discriminate.

in 2016, an article was written by Yanbo Ge, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf aim to see if there are racial discrimination in the provision of services by Peer Transportation Companies such as UberX and Lyft. The authors “test for discrimination in the peer-to-peer transportation domain” within two samples: Seattle and Boston. 

• In Seattle, the study found that African American passengers have to wait longer for a trip request to be accepted in both companies, longer for the cars to pick them up than other races in UberX and “that UberX drivers see only a passenger’s location and star rating before accepting or declining a trip request, and see the passenger’s name after accepting. Lyft drivers can see the passenger’s name and photo before accepting or declining the request”

• In Boston, they focused on cancellations. Finding that ” UberX drivers are nearly three times as likely to cancel a ride on a male passenger upon seeing that he has a “black-sounding” name”. That behavior was not found in Lyft

The findings of the study confirm there is a worse service in Seattle and Boston if you are African American than if you are a white person.

To increase fairness, the authors recommended the following measures:

• Do not use names to identify passengers and drivers. Instead, provide a unique passcode that is given to the passenger and the driver to confirm the correct identity at the time of pickup
• To avoid extended rides given to female passengers, fixed fares could be offered between pickup and drop off points.
• Since cancellations likely cost travelers more time than declined requests, increasing the disincentives for driver cancellations
• Perform periodic audits of driver behavior that appears to be discriminatory in nature
• Passengers might resort to creating accounts with nicknames that deidentify their race
• Something like “if we [the authors] manage to do the research for discrimination, companies also can do it”

The article is available in SSRN: Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies, NBER Working Paper No. w22776.

For further reading, the Ph.D. thesis of Anne Elizabeth Brown “Ridehail Revolution: Ridehail Travel and Equity in Los Angeles” from UCLA.