“You’re gonna have to close that door harder,” the driver said. I had not properly closed the right-hand side back passenger door. After I did, she explained that her car is “a mom car” and that it’s built to have its doors slammed hard.
It was the first time I saw a woman Uber driver. She did pretty well and I gave her five stars, but that won’t be enough to raise her rating to 5.0. Maybe it’ll at least lift her above 4.88.
Maybe the men who could have been assigned for that trip of less than ten miles felt it was too short of a trip to bother themselves with. Or maybe they were near the ends of their shifts and I was going in the wrong direction for them.
I was going to an art gallery in Hamtramck. The driver tried to start a conversation, which didn’t go very far, and then perhaps she thought I was the kind of passenger who prefers not to have conversations during rides.
Later, to go home from Hamtramck, I was assigned another woman, who actually has a 4.93 rating, but she spent the entire ride on the phone with a friend. If it weren’t for the fact that the app shows the license plate, I would not have been certain I was getting in the right car. She was more willing to go on surface streets, rather than trying to keep as much of the ride on a freeway.
The foregoing is anecdotal, and it could even be fictitious, but it checks out with a 2018 study conducted by a team of economists that includes two Uber drivers. Kirsten Korosec for Fortune:
Female Uber drivers make 7% less per hour than their male counterparts—even though the algorithms that determine pay for the ride-hailing service are gender blind, according to a multi-year study.
The study, led by economists, examined data from more than 1.8 million drivers and 740 million Uber trips in the United States between January 2015 and March 2017. The paper, called “Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence From Over a Million Rideshare Drivers,” was written by five economists, including two employed by Uber, two Stanford professors, and John List, chairman of the University of Chicago economics department. List is also the chief economist at Uber.
Korosec cites the 2016 figure that women make 89¢ for every $1 men get. I hope it’s higher now but unfortunately it probably still falls short of dollar-for-dollar parity.
I’m not sure if the Fortune article is longer but I couldn’t read it all because I’m not a subscriber, or if I did read the whole article and the ad was for me to read other Fortune articles. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox wrote an article for Forbes that goes more in depth as to the possible reasons women Uber drivers are paid less:
- Location: Women work in locations with less earning potential, and/or are more willing to take shorter trips.
- Turnover: 60% of men will quit, compared to 76% of women. So the men who stay are more experienced drivers.
- Speed: Supposedly men drive slightly faster than women and are more efficient at avoiding slow-moving traffic.
Wittenberg-Cox points out that this is overlooking
that the environment and culture of the company itself may be impacting men and women differently. When you put a minority of women into a system designed by men (Uber could check the gender balance of the teams that designed their "gender blind" algorithms), you usually get systems normed for male preferences and perspectives. [emphases mine]
The fact that Uber can barely retain anyone—male or female—would give any employer pause. From a low base of 27% female drivers, they suffer a female turnover rate of 76%. This is not good for women drivers, and it hasn’t proven particularly good for women riders.
Women passengers might also be rated lower. I might have some anecdotal evidence as to this.
There seems to be high turnover at all levels of the Uber org chart. One new executive “had to be "coached" to learn to stop making misogynistic and racist remarks.” Wittenberg-Cox
asked Jennifer Cobbe, a Cambridge University researcher and the Coordinator of Cambridge’s Trustworthy Technologies research initiative, what she thought of the conclusions in the report. She noted the inherent value judgment in people getting paid more to drive faster.
“When they say that women are paid less in large part because they don’t drive as fast as men, they’re shifting the blame for women being paid less onto women themselves – as if this was an obvious, ‘rational’ explanation for the difference in pay which required no further analysis. As if paying faster drivers more was just the natural order of things. But, of course, it isn’t.”
[...]
… The Uber case study’s conclusions may actually be almost the opposite of what they were trying to prove. Rather than showing that the pay gap is a natural consequence of our gendered differences, they have actually shown that systems designed to insistently ignore differences tend to become normed to the preferences of those who create them.
It’s a recurring challenge confirms Cobbe. “You often see this in supposedly ‘rational’ analyses. They’re grounded in so many value-laden assumptions that themselves are rarely acknowledged and never challenged in any meaningful way. There’s nothing rational about this kind of analysis at all. But then ‘rationality’ has for centuries been a way for men to assert the inherent correctness of whatever it is they’re saying, regardless of evidence to the contrary or the shallowness of their view, and to dismiss whatever wholly reasonable concerns women are discussing.”
The open thread question: What have your experiences with women Uber drivers and passengers been like, and what do you think Uber executives and customers should do to close the pay gap?