Delhi’s transportation landscape has historically been a male-dominated domain. From auto-rickshaw drivers to taxi operators, men have long occupied the city’s public transport sector. Women behind the wheel, therefore, represent not just a cultural shift but also a socio-economic negotiation. To understand their perspective, TheRise spoke to women cab drivers in Delhi.
At 45, she never imagined she would be navigating Delhi’s chaotic traffic for a living. Kavita R, a single mother who had built her life around steady employment, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. “I lost my earlier job during the pandemic,” she recalls, her voice calm but firm. “I had no idea what I was going to do. I just knew I had to work for my daughter.“
Her story highlights a broader transformation taking place on Delhi’s streets, where women are increasingly taking the lead in what has traditionally been an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession. These women cab drivers are not merely earning a living; they are subtly but significantly reshaping perceptions of who “belongs” on the road, challenging the gendered geography of urban mobility in India’s capital.
The Road as a Gendered Space
Delhi’s transportation landscape has historically been a masculine domain. From auto-rickshaw drivers to taxi operators, men have dominated the steering wheels of the city’s public transport. Women constituted just about 14% of Uber’s driver-partners worldwide, according to data provided by Uber to the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in 2017. Notably, India was excluded from this dataset due to the extremely low representation of female drivers.
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“I couldn’t even ride a two-wheeler, forget a car,” said Kavita with a small laugh. “At my age, people think you’re too old to learn.” Her initial hesitation reflects broader societal skepticism about women’s capacity to handle what is perceived as demanding, risky work.
For women like Kavita, driving represents more than economic necessity. It becomes a pathway to empowerment. The transformation is both practical and psychological. “Driving has boosted my confidence,” she explains. “I handle all the vehicle permissions and formalities myself. I never thought I could manage that kind of responsibility before. Now I know I can stand on my own feet.“
This empowerment extends beyond individual drivers to their passengers. The presence of women cab drivers fosters a sense of “safety by presence“; as many women passengers feel more secure travelling with female drivers, particularly during late hours or in unfamiliar areas. This, in turn, creates a multiplier effect where one woman’s mobility enables other women’s mobility, gradually expanding the geography of safety within urban spaces.
Daily Navigation: Routes, Timing, and Choices
The daily work of driving reveals how gender intersects with urban navigation in complex ways. Kavita specializes in driving schoolchildren, a choice that reflects both market opportunities and social expectations about women’s “natural” caregiving abilities. “It’s a huge responsibility,” she explains. “Every child’s safety is in my hands. And every day, something new comes up: heavy traffic, delays, unexpected road issues. You have to think on your feet.“
Organizational Support: The Role of Taxshe
The emergence of organizations like Taxshe has been crucial in facilitating women’s entry into the driving profession. “Taxshe gave me a new lease on life,” Kavita says. “They taught me everything from handling a car to managing paperwork. I came in knowing nothing, and they didn’t give up on me,” she further added.
Taxshe, operating in cities like Bengaluru and Gurgaon, represents a new model of gendered support for women entering male-dominated professions. In 2019, founder Vandana Suri noted that the organization had “over a hundred women drivers” transporting more than 600 children and women. By 2023, TaxShe had trained 1,500 women in the preceding year and had signed up 13 franchise partners, reflecting its expanding operational base and growing role in empowering women drivers.
India has witnessed several such attempts to create women-centric ride-hailing services. Delhi’s Sakha Cab, Mumbai’s Viira Cabs and Priyadarshini Taxi Service sought to promote women drivers while serving female passengers. These ventures briefly captured public imagination and international praise, blending narratives of safety with those of women’s economic empowerment.
Yet, translating this promise into long-term viability has proved difficult. Most of these ventures struggled to scale sustainably, remaining niche despite their social value. The reasons are structural. Operationally, women drivers are often unable to commit to the long or irregular hours typical in the taxi industry because of safety concerns and the disproportionate burden of unpaid care responsibilities at home. To keep vehicles running on a 16-hour schedule, operators frequently need to employ two women drivers for a single car, effectively doubling labour costs. As a result, operating a women-only fleet becomes more expensive.
Wage disparities further compound the challenge. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index shows that women in India earn ₹39.8 for every ₹100 earned by men, reflecting a 60% gender pay gap. In the gig economy, where formal contracts, health insurance, and paid leave are largely absent, these inequities are further amplified, making sustained participation even more difficult for women.
Financially, these businesses rely heavily on external support rather than stable fare-based revenues. For example, some organizations derive around 70–80% of their income from partnerships and 20% from grants or donations. This dependence makes them vulnerable when funding wanes, as private investors often remain wary due to perceived low margins and limited scalability of such businesses.
Moreover, demand is geographically and temporally concentrated, often restricted to specific routes, which reduces overall market size. Critics also argue that while such services are socially important, they risk unintentionally reinforcing gender segregation and fail to address the deeper issue: unsafe public spaces and male behaviour that make women-only transport necessary in the first place.
As a result, even when organizations like Taxshe create pathways for women’s participation, they often channel that participation into segregated segments of the market rather than fostering full integration across all transportation services.
Global Context and Local Barriers
Internationally, women’s participation in transportation remains limited but varies significantly across contexts. In New York City, just 1% of yellow cab drivers are women, while the UK sees 3% female participation.
India’s numbers are even more stark. Women constitute fewer than 1% of drivers across India’s taxi and delivery sector, a figure that underscores the unique challenges facing women in Indian urban contexts. These barriers include concerns about personal safety, rigid societal norms, limited access to skills development, poor infrastructure, and significant wage disparities.
A fundamental obstacle to understanding and addressing women cab drivers’ challenges is the profound scarcity of official data. Major ride-hailing platforms like Ola and Uber do not disclose the number of women drivers on their platforms, and the state does not mandate such data collection. This absence creates a state of “invisibility” that makes it extremely difficult to assess female participation, track progress, or implement targeted interventions.
Government reports, though, mention the “gig economy” in glowing terms but rarely disaggregate data by gender, caste, or community, allowing policy to remain blind to what it doesn’t want to address.
Social Negotiation
Being a woman in this male-dominated profession generates complex social responses. “There’s appreciation, yes – some people admire what we do,” Kavita explains. “But there’s also criticism. People question whether women can handle this kind of work.“
“In my opinion, it’s equally difficult for women everywhere. This job is no different. But if you have the passion, nothing can hold you back,” she further added.
The “Road” Ahead
The transformation represented by women cab drivers requires supportive policy interventions across multiple levels. For ride-hailing platforms, this means implementing transparent data collection on driver demographics, creating targeted support programs for women drivers, and addressing safety concerns through technology and training.
Women-centric initiatives need sustainable funding models and regulatory support to move beyond pilot projects toward scaled operations. This requires coordination between private organizations, government agencies, and civil society groups to create ecosystems that support women’s entry and retention in transportation work.
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Most fundamentally, urban planning must incorporate gendered analysis of mobility patterns, safety concerns, and economic opportunities. The World Bank estimates that raising female labour participation from 35.6% to 50% could increase India’s GDP by 1 percentage point, suggesting that supporting women’s entry into sectors like transportation represents not just social progress but economic necessity.
As Kavita prepares for her afternoon school run, her smile reflects both pride and determination. “It’s not easy,” she acknowledges. “But nothing worth doing ever is. This is my road now – and I’m proud of it.“
Women behind the wheel represent both a cultural statement and a socio-economic negotiation. They challenge assumptions about who belongs in public space while navigating systems that continue to marginalize their participation. Their presence on Delhi’s roads signals the possibility for individual empowerment, for other women’s mobility, and for more inclusive urban futures.
Yet realizing this potential requires moving beyond celebrating individual stories toward systemic change. This means collecting data to make women drivers visible in policy discourse, creating supportive ecosystems that enable their success, and addressing the structural inequalities that make their participation both necessary and precarious. Only then can the shifting gears of individual women translate into a broader transformation of urban mobility itself.
Neeharika Sampathirao is an intern under TRIP
Mentored and Edited by Sneha Yadav