This is interesting. What interventions can be made to reduce this pay gap? With the reasons in the paper, should this gap be corrected (eg, force maximum speed, pay higher for slow drivers but only gender specific, etc etc).
> What interventions can be made to reduce this pay gap?
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.
why do you think it doesn't need to be corrected? you don't see how an equitable distribution of resources between the sexes is much more productive for the whole? nm the morality of it.
I believe strongly in an equal distribution of opportunity between the sexes. How would you propose fixing the gap that the paper describes? Simply paying women drivers 7% more? Would that be fair?
>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.
The free market already has one solution for this, imperfect as it may be. If an individual is the victim of criminal discrimination, they can seek legal council and determine if the case is prosecutable. I understand that this may not be economically viable for many; perhaps a collective focus on helping struggling individuals would help bolster support.
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.
I'm referring to the legal system that enforces constitutional rights, which is a far-cry from the government imposing restrictions on voluntary transactions among private citizens. Laws that enforce your inalienable human rights to not be physically harmed or robbed, to be left alone, are always a good thing.
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.
This is similar to the overall pay discrepancy between genders. It’s usually harder to find if the reason is discriminatory or not. But I have encountered people who favor pay equalization even in non-discriminatory circumstances. So I’m curious to learn more perspectives.
Since the pay gap is fair (in the sense that it's driven by personal preferences and experience), there are only two reasons to reduce it: 1) if you think it's going to cost you women drivers and 2) if you think that men are driving dangerously fast. Point 2 is something that Uber actually has enough data to assess and address, but the better motivation would be safety. Reducing the pay gap would be an ancillary benefit. As for point 1, I think the only option is education. Point out that pay increases with experience, and by how much. Maybe draw drivers' attention to more lucrative areas? Though I think that's contingent on experience as well. Beyond that, any attempt to address the pay gap seems unfair and, as fatjokes points out, possibly illegal.
> What interventions can be made to reduce this pay gap?
This is a scary question to me. Is making arbitrary changes to align the world more with your definition of fairness really a good idea? Isn't this the precursor to authoritarian/totalitarian thinking? People chose to drive faster, people chose to prefer faster rides, neither of these things are "wrong" in any way. The market is simply rewarding those who provide service which is most desirable. I'm not saying it's fair, but it's not unfair in a way we should try and control IMHO. Any human attempts to correct the arbitrary injustice/unfairness in nature are only bound to shift/perpetuate it.
Edit:
My point really is, nature is evil, but by making choices ourselves which harm others to decrease natures evil, we become evil ourselves. It's the classic trolley/surgeon problem. I argue it's better not to flip the switch on the track and let nature take it's course because otherwise you become the arbiter, and a murderer. It seems more heartless with the trolley problem, but it's conforms to intuition with the surgeon scenario.
> What interventions can be made to reduce this pay gap?
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.
Women are making less money driving the same amount of time. The easiest fix is to pay women more. The technical fix is to auto report speeders (mostly men) to the cops for automated tickets. Since we're all about upholding the law here, Uber knows they are speeding and putting people at risk for a few bucks. Uber should report them to the authorities for proper penalties.
You really should read the paper. One of the factors influencing their pay is the amount of time spent driving, so no, they are not "driving the same amount of time".
Secondly, nowhere does it say they are going above the speed limit only that they drive speedier.
An hour in the car is an hour in the car. It's the same amount of time. I'm not saying that women spend more hours in the car than men. Don't be deliberately obtuse.
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?
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:
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.
Better protections for female drivers that make them less likely stop driving for Uber. For example having an option to favor Women or only pickup women, or only pickup women and men with a high rating, etc so that they can feel more safe driving for Uber. If a female Uber driver has controls that allow her to stay out driving longer than she would normally be comfortable with, she can generate higher earnings and close some of that gap.
Yes, but men are statistically more likely than women to be the victim of violence. Male drivers are taking on just as much, if not more of a safety risk driving for Uber, why should special accommodation be made for women?
>What interventions can be made to reduce this pay gap?
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.
"Furthermore, while Uber now allows riders to tip their drivers in-app, this did not become available until June 2017, which is outside the scope of our data. We do not believe that cash tips – which were possible before
in-app tipping – had a material impact on driver earnings."
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.
Anecdotally, nobody I know ever tipped an Uber driver before tipping was introduced in the app, so there being a negligible tipping component would not surprise me at all.
"We find that the entire gender gap is caused by three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing),
preferences over where/when to work, and preferences for driving speed."
So men make more because they are more likely to take initiative, be more flexible, and drive faster?
> but the society/system it exists in will still be biased
Is biased even the right word here? Maybe I'm just nit-picking, but bias implies some level of intention IMHO. The "bias" here is really just the coincidental effects of nature.
I'd say it's more like, "So the service can be unbiased, but trends will inevitably emerge from natural arbitrary properties of the system".
My read of the study is that it more or less proves the opposite: the wage gap is the result of women having such powerfully different preferences that it shows up even when we know discrimination is impossible.
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?
"Push button A to get money, or push button B to get more money"
then everyone would push button B. But in reality there are other factors. Like "button B has a slightly higher chance of injuring you". Or "button B can only be pushed late at night".
It's entirely possible that people are biologically programmed to have different risk/effort/reward preference curves.
You've hit the nail on the head with "button B can only be pushed at night". If we set up society such that it's riskier for one group to access good earning potential, basically the definition of systemic bias.
To be more concrete here, if it's unsafe for women to drive uber at 2am on a Friday night because of the risk of assault, that's systemic bias (and it should be fixed).
I don't know about violence in Ubers specifically, but in general statistically men are more likely to be the victim of violent attacks than women.
If men are simply more willing to face those risks for money than women, how do you fix that (apart from trivial theoretical solutions like "remove all violence")?
Your comment is a great example of the logical fallacy:argument by ridicule. You haven't made a valid point. You re wrong. And you can prove this to yourself (if you're able) by making an attempt to address his comment directly, without ridicule.
See, he did not claim that women want less money. He claimed (and he's right - and you're not even remotely able to challenge this, and you burn with anger at your failure, because it destroys your entire worldview, and deep down, you know it) that men and women are different.
I dare you to address his actual point. I dare you.
Please edit such swipes out of your comments here. Besides crossing into incivility, they add no information and make divisive topics even more divisive.
So location, work experience, and driving speed are gender biased? Those are all free choices which depend entirely on the driver. As others have noted, women tend to earn more from tips in general, which are poorly represented in this study. So women will actually earn more than the study has indicated, and claims to have fully identified with those three points. Thus women actually appear to probably earn at the very least their fair share - or perhaps even more - when tips are taken into account.
> 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 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. The Uber case is being used to crystallize an example where there exists a bias in the results, and yet it is clearly not due to prejudice. It is illustrating the point that just because there is a pay-gap doesn't mean the source of the pay-gap is employers who don't properly compensate their female employees. Non-malicious systematic influences can easily cause such an effect.
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.
This is either some next level trolling, or really odd.
> 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.
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.
>Overall, our results suggest that, even in the gender-blind, transactional, flexible environment of the gig economy, gender-based preferences (especially the value of time not spent at paid work and, for drivers, preferences for driving speed) can open gender earnings gaps.
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?
58 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] thread... that's wage discrimination and is illegal.
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.
>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.
This is a scary question to me. Is making arbitrary changes to align the world more with your definition of fairness really a good idea? Isn't this the precursor to authoritarian/totalitarian thinking? People chose to drive faster, people chose to prefer faster rides, neither of these things are "wrong" in any way. The market is simply rewarding those who provide service which is most desirable. I'm not saying it's fair, but it's not unfair in a way we should try and control IMHO. Any human attempts to correct the arbitrary injustice/unfairness in nature are only bound to shift/perpetuate it.
Edit:
My point really is, nature is evil, but by making choices ourselves which harm others to decrease natures evil, we become evil ourselves. It's the classic trolley/surgeon problem. I argue it's better not to flip the switch on the track and let nature take it's course because otherwise you become the arbiter, and a murderer. It seems more heartless with the trolley problem, but it's conforms to intuition with the surgeon scenario.
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 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.
So men make more because they are more likely to take initiative, be more flexible, and drive faster?
What exactly is the problem?
Is biased even the right word here? Maybe I'm just nit-picking, but bias implies some level of intention IMHO. The "bias" here is really just the coincidental effects of nature.
I'd say it's more like, "So the service can be unbiased, but trends will inevitably emerge from natural arbitrary properties of the system".
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?
JFC, listen to yourself...
"Push button A to get money, or push button B to get more money"
then everyone would push button B. But in reality there are other factors. Like "button B has a slightly higher chance of injuring you". Or "button B can only be pushed late at night".
It's entirely possible that people are biologically programmed to have different risk/effort/reward preference curves.
To be more concrete here, if it's unsafe for women to drive uber at 2am on a Friday night because of the risk of assault, that's systemic bias (and it should be fixed).
If men are simply more willing to face those risks for money than women, how do you fix that (apart from trivial theoretical solutions like "remove all violence")?
See, he did not claim that women want less money. He claimed (and he's right - and you're not even remotely able to challenge this, and you burn with anger at your failure, because it destroys your entire worldview, and deep down, you know it) that men and women are different.
I dare you to address his actual point. I dare you.
Please edit such swipes out of your comments here. Besides crossing into incivility, they add no information and make divisive topics even more divisive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
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.
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?