Absolutely wild that none of the dissenting comments suggest a means of lowering or eliminating sexual harassment of women passengers. Why not start there? Get creative.
Right now they have all the reasons in the world to be as hands-off on their checks as they can be. They don't behave like a business with employees. It costs nothing to accept almost anyone and then just weed out the worst of the worst to avoid brand damage.
But making these changes would cut into the bottom line too much. They want all the unemployable and dangerous people to work for them because they're so desperate that they'll accept the meager pay. So instead of making any deep, difficult structural changes, they ask the software team to add a checkbox to the app. The checkbox itself is fine by me, but it's just them taping over an issue that stems from the way they do business.
Dear readers, if you wish to get rid of the stop gap, advocate for this.
There are ways to report if a man has been sexual with a woman, but they somehow just don't get kicked out of the driver network.
Also just a simple example: Uber engineering blog is full of examples of how they rewrote their app in native Android then web then native again, but nothing about how to solve the real problems humans experience when driving with them.
It just feels that they view Uber as a simple logistic problem where drivers / riders are interchangeable and less like Tinder that tries to match people with similar scores abd kicks out the worst.
It would be cool if people have better ideas, but someone criticizing this workaround doesn't need to suggest something better, and it's not weird for them to lack better ideas but still post. It's a hard problem. And "better than nothing" might get an idea approved but doesn't let it escape criticism.
Edit: Germany has such a service https://www.femride.de/
It sounds like you'd rather I shut up, then you know, actually do something.