Get ready to freak out, liberals: There’s a wage gap among Uber drivers and it’s mostly caused by gender differences. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research called “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence From Over a Million Rideshare Drivers” shows that in the case of working for Uber, men make more than women because of their inherently different masculine traits that give them a slight advantage.
“Gig economy” is the buzz phrase now for a labor market boasting lots of short-term contract or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs. Typically it was assumed the growth and flexibility would favor women, who are statistically juggling work and the lion’s share of children and other household duties, and thus would utilize contract work more.
This particular study found there was an obvious gender wage gap among Uber drivers (more than one million surveyed) of about 7 percent. Are men just highly favored by Uber riders? Is sexism real in the U.S.? Are the shrieking feminists wearing pussy hats and marching against the authoritarian Trump administration actually on to something?
Not exactly.
The abstract of the study states, “We completely explain this gap and show that it can be entirely attributed to three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing), preferences over where to work (driven largely by where drivers live and, to a lesser extent, safety), and preferences for driving speed.” This is a somewhat unusual and thus fascinating look at the innate differences between men and women because of the apples-to-apples comparison. Typically, wage gap die hards compare engineers to preschool teachers and the comparison is too faulty to even bother with analyzing.
If you were to compare a male Uber driver and a female Uber driver with what you experientially know about men and women you might observe, which gender (generally) drives faster, takes more risks, and would drive at night? Men are naturally wired for and drawn to jobs that are riskier and thus pay more or are simply more lucrative because of what they produce (think engineering versus teaching preschool). They also tend to work longer hours, take fewer breaks (to bear and raise babies) and thus simply clock in more time at the end of the day.
There’s still hope for women who feel this might be somehow innately unfair. They either need to drive faster and at times of the day that seem a bit riskier, or simply enjoy the benefits of a flexible economy: “Our results suggest that there is no reason to expect the ‘gig’ economy to close gender differences. Even in the absence of discrimination and in flexible labor markets, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based differences in preferences and constraints can sustain a gender pay gap.”
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in D.C. who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
