As automated vehicles (AVs) move toward mainstream adoption, understanding how users learn about and build trust in them is critical. Prior research shows that women hold safety concerns and report low trust and familiarity with AVs. While limited exposure is often cited as a cause, growing evidence indicates that women’s needs, preferences, and safety priorities remain insufficiently addressed in AV design and governance. We conducted ten dyadic and five individual semi-structured interviews with fifteen women, guided by feminist HCI principles. We then analysed findings through a socio-ecological framework to explore trust and learning. Our findings show that women's needs and expectations for AVs develop in conversation with gendered and caregiving responsibilities, and experiences of safety and vulnerability. Trust and learning co-evolve in this process as a dynamic association of forces influencing inclusive mobility. We contribute a feminist socio-ecological account of trust–learning dynamics, identifying design and policy interventions that support inclusive onboarding, institutional accountability, and community-based co-learning for equitable AV adoption.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems