Uber crisis won't cause millennials to bail: survey
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber is in crisis, scrambling to grapple with accusations of a sexist work culture, an intellectual property lawsuit from Alphabet-owned Waymo and a critical search for a chief operating officer.
But none of that seems to matter to millennials, an overwhelming majority of whom plan to stick with the ride-sharing giant despite its issues.
Of 1,537 Uber users born in the 1980s and 1990s surveyed between March 3 and 25 — just weeks after a blog post by a female ex-engineer sent the company into damage-control mode — 93% said they have no plans to dump the app. The survey was conducted by student loan refinancing site LendEDU.
The results show a gap in attitudes between male and female riders.
Some 62% of the LendEDU survey's respondents were men and 38% were women. In those separate groups, 10.5% of women surveyed said they would stop using Uber, while only 5% of men said they would dump the service.
A culture of entrenched sexism was brought to light in a mid-February blog post by ex-engineer Susan Fowler, who described a male boss's unwanted advances and a human resources department that stood behind the offending supervisor because he was considered a valued employee, while warning the engineer her performance review could be penalized.
The survey also asked about political leanings, and of the 60% who provided that information, half labeled themselves liberal and half conservative. Liberals were three times more likely to drop Uber, but that still only amounted to a total of 11% saying they would stop using the service.
LendEDU did not ask Millennials why they largely preferred to stick with Uber, despite the availability of a similar service in rival Lyft.
The second-place ride-hailing company, which is valued at $7 billion compared to Uber's nearly $70 billion, has been pushing hard of late not only to expand to new cities (it hit 300 last month) but also to promote itself as a feel-good service with features such as charity donations.
On Monday, Uber released its first-ever report detailing the company's diversity numbers. Uber's staff make-up echoes that of other tech companies in being largely white, male and Asian. Women and employees of color at Uber are found largely in support and operations roles and not in technical or top management positions.
Despite the results of LendEDU's survey, other metrics suggest that Uber's issues may be impacting its bottom line.
Credit card spending data compiled by TXN Solutions says that while Uber had 83.5% of the national market in January, that share slipped to 79% in the weeks between Feb. 20 and March 3.
SimilarWeb, which tracks consumer use across desktop and mobile devices, shows Uber experienced a 22% decline to 85 million site/app visits between Jan. 17 and Feb. 17, which could have more to do with cyclical seasonal downturns. That said, Lyft's traffic decline over the same period was only 11% to 14 million visits.
Uber says business has been fine. The company's North American operations chief Rachel Holt told reporters on a conference call last week that Uber had seen big gains in ridership numbers in the first 10 weeks of 2017 compared to the same year-ago period.
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