The Gender Earnings Gap: Evidence from Over a Million Rideshare Drivers [pdf]
web.stanford.edu
web.stanford.edu
> We can explain the entire gap with three factors. First, through the logic of compensating differentials, hourly earnings on Uber vary predictably by location and time of week, and men tend to drive in more lucrative locations. The second factor is work experience. Even in the relatively simple production of a passenger’s ride, past experience is valuable for drivers. A driver with more than 2,500 lifetime trips completed earns 14% more per hour than a driver who has completed fewer than 100 trips in her time on the platform, in part because she learn where to drive, when to drive, and how to strategically cancel and accept trips. Male drivers accumulate more experience than women by driving more each week and being less likely to stop driving with Uber. Because of these returns to experience and because the typical male Uber driver has more experience than the typical female—putting them higher on the learning curve—men earn more money per hour. The residual gender earnings gap that persists after controlling for these two factors can be explained by a single variable: average driving speed.
The study did not have any actual tip data for drivers. Tipping was always an option in Uber before June 2017, it just became mandatory for the app to ask a user after each ride. I really think the study is missing some crucial data surrounding tips.
That's not true, tipping was not possible in the app, at all.
Does the pay gap exist after adjusting for insurance costs and expected long-term driver-born per mile cost not covered by insurance, which Uber drivers bear? Since the cause of the higher pay seems directly linked to the reason for the gender-based difference in insurance rates, this might be something to consider.
... that's wage discrimination and is illegal.
I don't see how you could do this without rewarding inefficiency and inexperience. More efficient workers with more experience should absolutely get paid more than new workers that don't do as good a job. Our entire society is structured on this concept.
It's easy though. Just pay women more. Uber can take a smaller cut of your pay if you have two x chromosomes.
Another approach would be to allow passengers to chose their driver's gender. More passengers will chose female over male drivers.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/equalcompensation.cfm
"The Equal Pay Act requires that men and women in the same workplace be given equal pay for equal work."
"If there is an inequality in wages between men and women, employers may not reduce the wages of either sex to equalize their pay."
Seems pretty straightforward. Pay has to be equal. Can't lower wages. Therefore, pay women more. Easy as pie.
According to the paper, 50% of the wage gap is due to driving speed alone. The conclusion is that men are speeding more frequently than women. To level the playing field, all speeders could be auto reported to the proper authorities.
Or, you know, just pay women more. It's a non-technical solution which requires no programming.
Personally, I'd like to see Uber speeders reported/ticketed automatically. Uber is hiding evidence of institutionalized crime from the authorities, again. It's an old story at this point.
> The conclusion is that men are speeding more frequently than women.
Prove it! I'm not American, but I am pretty sure that the average speed of 19.532 mph for men and 18.760 for women makes speeding an unlikely explanation without some evidence I just can't see. Can you point me to where breaking laws is the explanation?
LOL
You just discredited yourself. Everybody speeds in the US. To the point that obeying the speed limit can be quite dangerous in some cases.
Therefore, both men and women are speeding, but men are taking greater risks, speeding more. That's a problem, because a small increase in speed produces a large increase in kinetic energy. It's velocity squared:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy
The men are profiting by having a greater willingness to put their passengers and other drivers on the road in fatal danger. They are all breaking the law, but the men are more brazen about it.
Uber should solve this, because it is a serious problem. If you only look at the payment aspect, that is demonstrably easy to solve. Pay women more. Very easy.
If you want to solve the root problem, and not a symptom of the problem, then Uber needs to tackle the problem of drivers speeding. Automatic reporting of speeders is one approach. Another is to remove drivers from the pool of available drivers for any ill gotten time they gained by breaking the law. Save one minute with your fare because you drove 80MPH in a 70MPH zone on the freeway? Then make the driver invisible in app for one minute (or more) after dropping off the fare. There should be some cost imposed for breaking the law proportional to how fast the driver was going.
Frankly, society has a cost assigned to this already. They're called speeding tickets, and I see Uber drivers who should get them regularly.
What will Uber do when they switch to autonomous cars? Make the robots speed too? Given their willingness to break the law so brazenly as a company, I would not be surprised if this is what they do.
It would actually be pretty simple to eliminate this pay gap. All we would need to do is make it illegal to base the amount you pay someone on things like how much you actually valued their service.
>The second factor is work experience. Even in the relatively simple production of a passenger’s ride, past experience is valuable for drivers.
i.e. women should be given training to compensate for the a priori difference in experience.
women should also be educated about this
>hourly earnings on Uber vary predictably by location and time of week, and men tend to drive in more lucrative locations.
the obvious question becomes why aren't women driving during more lucrative times. is it because those times are late nights during which it's potentially more dangerous for a woman driver. this is of course a systemic issue of a larger system. my point is that usually when someone claims "accidental/benign inequality" all one needs to do is expand the scope to discover the malignant root.
A one-size-fits-all approach to equalising the playing field is a fool's errand, as it comes with massive costs both seen and unseen. Beyond the constitutionally-enforced right to not be criminally discriminated against, the remaining standards that lead to ever-improving equality-of-opportunity ought to be enforced socially.
The free market provides us with legal professionals (though the must be credentialed) who may be hired to fight a case with the best-interests of their client at heart. Depending on your jurisdiction, it may also allow for collective funding of individual legal cases.
I am of the opinion that pursuing real-life cases of legitimate criminal discrimination, and allowing virtuous ideas to win a marketplace of ideas, is the superior path to fairness and freedom for us all. This is direct opposition to the intersectional-collectivism that focusses on the aggregate-experience of an entire population and suggest solutions that are framed in this false paradigm.
And yet you still have people in here wondering what we can do about this new problem, or how this just goes to show that it's really the SYSTEM that's biased, man. All I can do is shake my head at this point.
>systematic influences can easily cause such an effect
>how this just goes to show that it's really the SYSTEM that's biased
that i have no idea what you're really trying to say.
> Non-malicious
no one cares if it's malicious or benign. ask a black person whether they care about the intentions of those they're being racially profiled by (for example). it doesn't matter. what matters if systemic inequalities exist - and here is proof that they do.
> The entire point of the paper is to show that you can observe a statistical anomaly like wage disparity whenever you compare two different populations, even when you essentially control for job effectiveness and isolate out any influence from malicious discrimination.
>systematic influences
>bias in the results
>SYSTEM that's biased
you really don't see that who i'm responding to isn't at all consistent in what they're trying to say? the first 3 aren't mutually consistent and the fourth makes no sense when contextualized against those prior inconsistencies.
How do women come to those "powerfully different preferences"? Do we think that all women got together and decided to only drive at less valuable times?
Or is it more likely that there are systemic/societal reasons why women as a group pick less-valuable times to drive?
Please edit such swipes out of your comments here. Besides crossing into incivility, they add no information and make divisive topics even more divisive.
Not sure this is the right conclusion to draw. If Uber driving is less safe for female drivers, it's hardly a "gender-based preference" that's driving the gap. If women are spending more of their flexible hours doing housework or caring for children than men do, this may not be a "preference". While the paper does a great job identifying factors correlated with lower income, does it really indicate an individual's "preference", or does it indicate that the situation they find themselves in either enables or prevents uber participation?