Women Uber Drivers Make Less Than Their Male Counterparts

Women Uber drivers only earn 93 cents on the dollar compared with their male colleagues, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows.

The study found several reasons for the gender pay gap among drivers for the ride-hailing company, including overall driving speed, the amount of time the drivers had worked for Uber and the timeframes and locations drivers preferred to work.

Those factors combined less mean income for women who drive for the ride-hailing company.

"We do not find that men and women are differentially affected by a taste for specific hours, a return to within-week work intensity, or customer discrimination," the authors of the study, who include Jonathan Hall, chief economist and director of public policy at Uber, and economists from Stanford University write in the study that was released Monday.

Uber drivers have already been shown to make a measly average $8 to $10 when factoring in various vehicle expenses. So a gender pay gap likely means that women drivers are at the lower end of that spectrum.

Even more troubling, the researchers found this trend to be prevalent throughout the entirety of the gig economy.

"Our results suggest that there is no reason to expect the 'gig' economy to close gender differences," the study authors write. "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."

To conduct the study, the researchers examined the labor supply choices of more than 1 million drivers on Uber's platform in the US.

H/T: MarketWatch