The newly-appointed commissioner and chair of the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC), Midori Valdivia, is among a growing number of women taking on key leadership roles in New York City’s ground transportation industry. Valdivia is the fourth woman to serve in that position, and her arrival comes as data shows that female operators now complete 6% of all monthly trips conducted in TLC-regulated black cars, liveries, yellow taxis, green cabs, and high volume, app-hail vehicles.
That percentage is a marked increase from just over a decade ago. According to the 2016 TLC Factbook, agency-licensed female operators completed 4% of trips by for-hire vehicles. For yellow taxis, female drivers completed less than 1% of all trips – a number that, a decade later, has stubbornly remained in the same range.
Diana Clemente, president of the Black Car Assistance Corp., also serves on the board of the Black Car Fund, which provides workers’ compensation coverage and other benefits. Clemente entered the business in the 1980s while she was in college studying to be a certified public accountant.
“I am a CPA, I never really expected to go to a car company,” said Clemente, who is also the chief executive of Big Apple Car, a black car base in Brooklyn. “But sometimes a door opens in life and you walk through it.”
Decades later, Clemente is still standing strong, even as the industry grapples with competition from new app-based rivals like Empower, the prospect of autonomous vehicles, escalating costs and traffic congestion.
“It shows how much we have moved forward – [this] would have been impossible 20 years ago,” said Cira Angeles, spokesperson for the Livery Base Owners association, co-founder and chief executive of L.A. Riverside Insurance Brokerage and president of Riverside Car & Limo Service. In January 2025, she became the first woman to be named president of the company. “It was a man’s industry,” she added, “and it really still is.”
On the taxi side, Bhairavi Desai has been a labor leader representing the New York Taxi Workers Alliance since it was founded in 1998. Since that time, she has protested against unfair regulations and fought for driver benefits and protections.
Source: The City
