Gender Pay Gap in Uber Drivers
2018-02-07 15:55:04.544408+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
David Henderson in the Library of Economics and Liberty: Male Uber Drivers Earn More and It's Not Due to Discrimination. I think its an overstatement to say "not due to discrimination", but drawing on The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers by Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, Jonathan Hall John A. List, and Paul Oyer which says:
We find that men earn roughly 7% more per hour than women on average, which is in line with prior estimates of gender earnings gaps within specifically defined jobs (Bayard et al. (2003), Barth et al. (2017)). 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.
I haven't had time to dig in yet to see if they looked at whether women don't feel comfortable with a certain class of rides or pick-ups and drop-offs in less savory neighborhoods, which is my first thought of impacts, but there are some interesting notes here.