Uber employee here. No, absolutely not. We would not do this, and large swaths of the company, like myself, would quit if this were the case.
I wonder if there are any safeguards in place against this. E.g. take samples of male/female, different ethnicities, etc. that you want to treat identically, and check if they pay the same on average... or put that somehow in the pricing algorithm as a constraint.
I'm sure a naive algorithm with a lot of inputs would, after optimization and without supervision, make single women in bad parts of the city at night pay more. It will probably find a lot more cases to take advantage of, like white (black) people in a neighbourhood where they are the minority and don't feel safe or comfortable. Or rides from places with high percieved crime rates (it wouldn't know the crime rates, it would just know people pay more for certain routes).
It is understandable for this to happen if there's any kind of machine learning deciding prices, it doesn't have to be designed discrimination to exist in this form.
Also, if you or other Uber employees would quit over this behavior, why haven't you already quit? This is arguably less egregious than many of the reported abuses of employees.
Will this be reported and investigated within Uber?
I had an Uber ride from a driver who accused Uber of paying a lower surge rate than what the passenger was paying. I assured him this wasn't the case but he insisted it. I told him exactly what I was paying, gave him my personal cell number and told him to call me if he collected less than this amount (less the Uber %). He never called me.
A lot of people have suspicions and conspiracy theories but Uber would not be in business if it did things like this. Most of the Uber employees believe strongly in what the company is doing, around the world, and exploiting women by charging them higher fees is not something we would tolerate. That's not how a sustainable company makes money.
Perhaps having an opaque, complex pricing scheme isn't great for customer service or public perception of the company.
Amazon tried this a few years ago, and I believe they stopped doing this but I'm not sure. But if I knew or suspected that Amazon was trying to squeeze a few percent from me, it would make me less inclined to use them. I can't see how this isn't the case with Uber as well, if customers suspect they are being gouged. It would then open the doors for vast accusations like the twitter post.
You just don't notice because they get replaced, and the new people assume that existing practices are the norm. The world keeps spinning.
I guess my point is, if you don't see many people leaving at once, that isn't evidence there isn't something fishy going on. People have families, mortgages, children's tuition payments...
Businesses price discriminate. Against different bands of customers, perhaps by race, income, zip code or gender. It happens. It's smart. It's profit-maximizing. It's amoral. There's nothing inherently bad about it.
So what if a band of customers is being charged higher? What if they are actually willing to pay more? Why leave the surplus on the table? Are they satisfied with the service?
Look, I'm about as far as you can get from a free market Randroid, but this is just basic microeconomics.