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The Sunday Paper – The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers

The gig economy has been touted as a place where the gender pay gap is less likely to reveal itself as it offers a more level playing field for people who contribute their services than more traditional places of work. So why do male UBER drivers earn around 7% more per hour worked than women doing exactly the same job?

The paper highlighted today, from Cody Cook et al writing in a Working Paper for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has the answers. Although U.S. and UBER-specific they shed light on other occupations and usefully contribute to the discussion as to why a gender pay gap persists.

Before we get to the reveal it’s worth highlighting what the research showed about what’s NOT causing the difference. Data analyzed from 1m drivers shows no sign of customer discrimination based on gender. When calls are accepted customers get the name and picture of the driver and there’s no evidence that female drivers are then systematically cancelled. Nor is there a return to intensity. Women work less hours on the whole but this preference for less hours is NOT the root cause of those hours being less productive. Finally, the times drivers worked were also not a factor.

So what is causing the difference? Three things. Experience on the platform, a preference for when and where to work and driving speed. Experience on the platform seems to result in men being smarter about how to manage calls. Second, women prefer not to work in high crime-risk areas or where there may be more difficult passengers coming out of bars but the biggest difference, accounting for 50% of the 7% differential, is due to driving speed. The UBER payment system rewards speed and men, on the whole, drive faster than women.

The paper concludes the highlighting of these gender specific differences may help promote training in more formal workplaces, especially in the area of work experience, to narrow outstanding gender pay differences. It also suggests, if a pay gap is gender-risk related, it may be unrealistic to expect the gap to narrow in certain occupations.

You can access the paper in full via the following link Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy

Happy Sunday.

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