Why Uber’s algorithm is not working to beat the gender pay gap
A study of the earnings and habits of nearly 2-million drivers appears to provide an answer — but it leaves out some crucial questions
Uber is trying to defeat the gender pay gap by relying on an algorithm that has no idea whether drivers are men or women. But is it working? A recent paper studying more than a million drivers reached a conclusion: not so much. Men earn about 7% more than women do, as it turns out. This could be taken as proof that — just as Google engineer James Damore wrote in a memo that got him fired — women are just different from men, and they do things differently at work. More likely, however, the situation is an example of our excessive trust in flawed algorithms that perform important functions, determining, for example, how work is rewarded. The way Uber pays drivers, indeed, rules out some common causes of gender pay gaps. There’s no negotiation involved, so there’s no advantage from bargaining harder. There’s no direct reward to working more hours per week (well, some bonus schemes do reward it, but the authors of the paper say they don’t have a material effect on the data). And, since ...
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