Bolt seeks to increase number of female drivers to 50%, currently less than 10% - Bolt General Manager in Ukraine
The Bolt online taxi service sees one of its main tasks for 2025 as helping people transition from owning a personal car to a shared economy model, which involves a shift in work culture and the development of new service categories, Bolt’s general manager in Ukraine, Serhiy Pavlyk, said.
"Thinking about how to achieve this, we set ourselves sub-goals, one of which was developing the women-for-women category for female drivers. We worked to encourage as many women as possible to take up this job and to change stereotypes that driving is exclusively a male profession," he said at the CEO Summit 2025 hosted by Forbes Ukraine in Kyiv on Friday.
Pavlyk noted that the company sees progress in developing this category of drivers, but it is still far from the targets set at the beginning of 2025. Currently, the number of female drivers at Bolt has increased 2.5-3 times, but it still has not reached 10%. In contrast, the company would like to see a healthy balance of around 50%.
According to the company’s head, one of the main challenges for Bolt in 2025 has also been the rebooting of its team.
"Of our five managers today, three are new people who joined the team literally a few months ago. We searched for them for a long time. The selection process was very thorough. Out of more than 700 applicants, we chose three people. My main focus has been helping these people adapt to our culture and our approach, since some of them came from more traditional industries — from the metallurgical sector, for example," Pavlyk noted.
Describing Bolt’s work culture, the head of the service said that the company promotes transparency, strongly encourages initiative, and tolerates mistakes as long as the specialist has learned from them and shared those lessons with colleagues.
Speaking about his own goals for 2026, the head of Bolt named the need to better understand people and to build a system of effective interaction among them.
