Work times for Uber drivers are flexible, a factor that should favour women. There are no pay negotiations because all jobs and fares are determined by a gender-blind algorithm. The rate of pay is tied directly to output. There’s little scope for barefaced gender discrimination. Last year a poll of 2000 female gig workers in America by payments firm Hyperwallet found 86 per cent believe gig work offers “the opportunity to make equal pay to their male counterparts”. But it turns out there's a gender pay gap in the gig economy after all. A study of more than a million American Uber rideshare drivers has found male drivers get roughly 7 per cent more an hour, on average, than female drivers.

Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video It is a substantial gap given the workers were doing exactly the same job and were being despatched and paid by those gender-blind algorithms. The team of researchers from Stanford University, University of Chicago and Uber found no evidence of outright discrimination against female drivers either by the Uber app or by customers. Instead, they concluded the “entire gap” can be explained by three behavioural differences between male and female drivers. First, men tend to drive more hours each week than women and they typically stay driving for Uber for a longer period (men are much more likely than women to have been driving on Uber for more than two years).

That extra experience means more men learn which routes and times are the most profitable - the result is extra money for each hour, on average. Drivers who had taken over 2,500 trips earned an average of US$3 more per hour than those with less than 100 trips. “Because of these returns to experience and because the typical male driver on Uber has more experience than the typical female—putting them higher on the learning curve—men earn more money per hour,” said the study titled “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers” published last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Experience accounted for about a third of the gender earnings gap. Second, men tended to drive in more lucrative places and at more lucrative times than women, such as early morning trips to an airport.

Men were also more willing to work in potentially unsafe (but lucrative) areas – such as late night pick-ups from bars. “Men earn a compensating differential for their willingness to drive in areas with higher crime and more drinking establishments,” the study said. Almost 20 per cent of Uber’s gender pay gap was explained by these differences in when, and where, male and female drivers tended to operate. But the biggest cause of the pay gap – about half – resulted from something very simple: speed. The massive data crunch revealed male Uber drivers went 2.2 per cent faster, on average, than their female counterparts.

Because driving faster means journeys are finished quicker, men racked up more trips an hour and that pushed up their average rate of pay. “Increasing speed increases expected driver earnings in almost all Uber settings,” the study says. On the basis of these findings there is little reason to expect the gig economy will eliminate gender pay differences. But the study of Uber drivers also shows that the economy-wide gender pay gap is not just caused by discrimination in the workplace. “Even in the absence of discrimination and in flexible labour 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,” the researchers say.