It is a Tuesday night in a city that does not sleep so much as dim its lights. A woman steps out of an office building, phone already in her hand, thumb moving before her feet do. She opens a ride app, orders a car, and sends her location to a friend without thinking about it. It is not fear exactly. It is habit, built from a thousand small calculations most people never have to make.
The driver arrives. She checks the license plate twice against the app before she opens the door. She sits behind the passenger seat, not beside it. Halfway through the ride she glances at the map on her phone, confirming the route matches what she expected.
She arrives home, texts “here safely” to the friend who is waiting for that message, and steps inside. No one measured any of this. No report will ever mention it. And yet it happened, the same way it happens to millions of women every single night, in every city that calls itself modern.
Meet Silvia Tallon
Silvia Tallon is the CEO and Co-Founder of SHEDRIVES, a Barcelona-based venture building the first independent safety certification standard for women and children in ride-hailing, taxi, and carpooling services. Before that, she spent more than two decades in C-level roles across eight countries, breaking through industries not built with women at the top. What defines her is not the titles. It is her refusal to accept that a problem is unsolvable simply because no one has bothered to count it.
Two Decades Before the Night Shift
Tallon’s path did not begin in mobility. It began in law, at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, before she moved into marketing with a master’s degree from EAE Business School. From there, her career took her through some of the biggest names in global apparel and sport, adidas, Reebok, and Levi’s among them, in leadership roles that spanned Russia, India, Israel, and beyond.
Each posting sharpened something specific. Living and working across radically different markets taught her to read a country before she tried to sell to it. It also taught her, repeatedly, what it meant to be underestimated in rooms built for someone else. She broke through more than once, earning recognition along the way, including an Effie and two Cio Sports awards.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, she became a single mother to twin boys, raising them across Moscow, New Delhi, and Barcelona while running businesses on three continents. That responsibility, more than any boardroom, shaped how she leads today. It taught her that resilience is not a personality trait. It is a discipline you rebuild every morning.
When she eventually returned to Barcelona after years abroad, most people who knew her career expected the next chapter to look like the last one. Instead, she made a decision that surprised nearly everyone close to her.
The Report Nobody Wants to Write
Tallon became a Cabify driver. Not as a stunt, and not for a headline. For six months, she drove alone, day and night, and used every ride as an interview. By the end, she had spoken with more than 600 women about how they actually experience safety in urban mobility, not how a survey imagines they might.
“I did not commission a market study on women’s safety in mobility. I drove the car myself.” That single decision reframes her entire leadership philosophy. She does not trust distance from a problem. She trusts proximity to it, even when proximity means sitting in traffic at two in the morning instead of reading a summary at nine.
What she found matched a number she now repeats often: eighty percent of women report feeling unsafe in ride-hailing. No certified safety standard existed anywhere in Spain or the European Union to address it. So she built one. SHEDRIVES is not another ride-hailing app competing for the same riders. It sits above the operators, Uber, Cabify, Bolt, taxis, and Blablacar among them, certifying drivers through training, independent audits, and real-time monitoring, aligned with Spain’s AENOR standards body and emerging EU sustainability reporting rules.
The disruption is not technical. It is structural. She is naming a category that companies have quietly avoided putting on paper. As she puts it on her own channels, companies publish detailed sustainability reports measuring carbon to the decimal, yet almost none of them ask how many women declined a late meeting, a business trip, or a promotion because getting home did not feel safe. A company can hit Net Zero and still, by her account, fail half its workforce without ever knowing it.
Her leadership style follows the same logic internally. “I tell my team clearly when I do not know the answer, and I expect the same from them.” In a company built around a standard that has no direct precedent, she treats admitted uncertainty as the honest starting point of real work, not a weakness to hide from investors or each other.
Ask her for the single achievement she is proudest of, and it is not an award on a shelf. It is the choice to step out of a stable, high-status career and spend half a year learning something secondhand information could never have taught her.
The Tallon Playbook: 5 Lessons
Go to where the problem lives before you decide how to solve it. Dashboards describe a problem. Presence explains it.
Treat unmeasured harm as unmeasured risk, not as a non-issue. If your reporting has no line for it, that does not mean it is not happening.
Say “I do not know” before your team has to say it for you. Uncertainty admitted early builds more trust than confidence performed under pressure.
Let personal responsibility sharpen professional judgment, not soften it. Raising two sons while running companies across continents taught Tallon more about prioritization than any strategy course did.
Build the standard if the standard does not exist. Waiting for someone else to certify the obvious is not patience. It is a decision, and it has a cost.
What the Report Should Have Said
The woman on that Tuesday night will never file a complaint. She will simply keep sharing her location, keep checking plates twice, keep sending that one small text home, and no company report will ever count what it cost her to do it quietly, year after year.
Silvia Tallon spent six months learning exactly that cost, one ride at a time, so that somebody finally would.
Silvia Tallon, MSc, is the CEO and Co-Founder of SHEDRIVES, based in Barcelona, Spain. She builds independent safety certification standards for women and children across ride-hailing, taxi, and carpooling services throughout Europe. To connect with Silvia or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile or shedrives.me.
