Women are at the crux of proving that they get paid less for the same work... and finally, a research paper (Why aren't more students doing these, and releasing the results for publication) that shows at Uber, they do, because they aren't working as much, nor as fast

5 economists — two who are employed by Uber; two Stanford professors, and a chairman of the University of Chicago economics department worked together to draft a research paper on the women's pay issue, at Uber.


Women drivers make 7% less per hour than men, because, they drive slower.

Men drive more frequently during the week, and last longer at Uber.

77% of women at Uber quit after 6 months
65% of men do

The research paper is called “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence From Over a Million Rideshare Drivers.”

The pay at Uber works mathmatically, not based on looks, gender, or age.

Uber pays drivers based on a relatively simple, transparent formula that takes into account how long your ride is in miles, how long the ride takes, and potentially, a surge multiplier where sometimes there’s, excessively high demand. 

So the fare itself is determined by an algorithm, which is gender-blind. The dispatch itself is gender-blind. And pay structure’s tied directly to output and not negotiated.

The result you know know, and why. But, here's a theory that the UC economics chairman had, which turned out to find no ground.

He thought they would find the pay gap would slightly favor women, they had worked fewer hours per week so they had a chance to cherry-pick the better hours during the week, and if there was discrimination on the platform, it would be due to riders preferring female drivers to male drivers.

Instead, they found, among other things, where people pick up is more important for contributing to the gender gap than the when.
There are differences between when men and women drive.
Men are much more likely to drive the graveyard overnight shift, which could have more people coming home from bars or whatnot.
 But women are actually dramatically more likely to drive the Sunday afternoon shift when football is on. Maybe women are more willing to go drive for Uber then.

Men are far more likely to have been driving on Uber for over two years. Women leave the platform much more often than men.  Relevant to income, the longer a driver is with Uber, the better at figuring out when and where to drive they get, how fast to drive, and how to strategically accept or cancel rides that they think are a bad match. Ergo, women make less because they don't gain the experience men who stay at Uber longer, accumulate.

On top of that,  even for those who are on the platform for the same amount of time, the average man drives about 50 percent more trips per week than the average woman, and that illustrates the experience effect for those who have been on the platform the same number of months.

So, digging into the factors that cause 7% difference on average between men and women,
30 percent of the pay gap can be explained by returns to experience.
20 percent of the gap can be explained by time and location of work.
50 percent of the gap, is speed... men are actually completing more trips per hour than women.

By the way, the University of Michigan transportation research unit, they looked at a big, nationally representative sample of police-reported crashes, and they did seem to find that females, on average — on a per-mile driven basis — have more crashes than males.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about-the-gender-pay-gap/