The "Uber" pay gap? The feminists aren't going to like the answer - Granite Grok

The “Uber” pay gap? The feminists aren’t going to like the answer

Uber pay gapFrom a study “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence From Over a Million Rideshare Drivers.”, the folks at Freakonomics Radio did an interview with the authors (RE: “…The paper was written by five economists — two who are employed by Uber; two Stanford professors; and one researcher who’s been on Freakonomics Radio several times: John List, who’s chairman of the University of Chicago economics department, and he moonlights as head of the ubernomics team at Uber.”)

The Pay Gap has been debunked all kinds of times – that 77% is merely a talking point by lazy Leftists.  In fact, studies show that women now out-income males coming out of college as long as they are in the same industries (and studies show that women often choose lower much lower paying careers than men).  But that’s not the difference here as an Uber driver – I guess that militant Feminists might just chalk it up to another instance of “toxic masculinity” because the male drivers don’t drive like female ones.  From the transcript, a fascinating story why men make about 7% more than women:

DUBNER: Okay, a third of the gap can be explained by returns to experience. You said about 20 percent of the gap can be explained by time and location of work. But that leaves almost half that can be explained by the third factor. What is that?

LIST: That’s right. So after we account for experience now we’re left scratching our heads. So, we’re thinking, “Well, we’ve tried discrimination. We’ve done where, when. We’ve done experience. What possibly could it be?” What we notice in the data is that men are actually completing more trips per hour than women. So this is sort of a eureka moment.

DUBNER: They’re driving faster, aren’t they?

HALL: Yeah. So the third factor, which explains the remaining 50 percent of the gap, is speed.

DIAMOND: So men happen to just drive a little bit faster, and because driving a little bit faster gets you to finish your trips that much quicker, and get on to the next trip, you can fit more trips in an hour, and you end up with a higher amount of pay.

DUBNER: Now how did these Uber driver data for male/female speed compare to male/female driver speed generally? Do we know for a fact that men generally drive faster than women?

LIST: Yeah, what you find is that in the general population men actually drive faster than women.

 

I read the whole interview and would suggest you do as well.  While it is long, it’s easy reading and it is fascinating to see how they eliminated each factor and it just comes down to that one little thing – men get paid more because they do more and are willing to accept a bit more risk in speed and in the locations and kinds of fares they do differently.

As far as Uber driving is concerned, there ARE differences between men and women.  For the feminists out there – SCIENCE!  And math, and statistics, and knowing how to ask the right questions of the right kind of data.  It’s not the Patriarchy (the Feminist version of “CLIMATE CHANGE!”?).

 

(H/T: Instapundit)

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