Founder Michael Pelletz, an Uber driver himself, said he came up with the idea for Chariot after he – as a man - felt uncomfortable with a male passenger. And after talking to his wife and many female Uber passengers, Mr. Pelletz “knew he had to come up with a better way to keep people safe,” explains Chariot’s website. “Especially women passengers and drivers.”

But Chariot's female-only hiring and service practices will likely face tough legal battles in the near future, civil rights lawyers tell the Boston Globe.

“To limit employees to one gender, you have to have what the law calls a bona fide occupational qualification. And that’s a really strict standard,” Massachusetts employment law specialist Joseph Sulman tells the Globe. “The law’s really tough on that. For gender, it’s not enough to say, ‘we really just want to have a female here because our customers prefer that to feel safer.’”

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In May 2015, Uber announced an ambitious goal to recruit female drivers. Through a partnership with UN Women, Uber said the ride-hailing company would hire one million more female drivers by 2020. But one week after the company’s press release, UN Women executive director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka broke the partnership with Uber, amid backlash from union groups who said the promised jobs were unsafe and ill paid.



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