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De-Gigging The Gender Pay Gap

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The gender pay gap is alive and well. Women’s median annual earnings are almost $10,000 less per year than men’s. And the gender gap between the wages of new college graduates has grown since 2000. Even the platform economy, with its promise of flexibility and optimal use of talents, has a gender pay gap. At Uber, it may only be 7% , but in other parts of platform world, it is much larger.

In a recent analysis, Honeybook – which serves as a business and financial management platform for solopreneurs and freelancers – analyzed more than 350,000 invoices from freelancers, and surveyed 1800 freelancers.

Honeybook initially found an 11% annual income gap between men and women on its platform. But it dug further, and found that women were making 26% less per project.

Here’s what it discovered about the gender pay gap by industry in 2019:

  • DJ/Musician: Women earn 38 cents to the male dollar
  • Photographer: Women earn 65 cents to the male dollar
  • Marketing Professional: Women earn 68 cents to the male dollar
  • Graphic Designer: Women earn 86 cents to the male dollar
  • Web Designer: Women earn 88 cents to the male dollar
  • Event Planner: Women earn 97 cents on the male dollar
  • Cinematography: Women earn one cent more than men

Because women took on more projects/year than men – 22% — that helped shrink the gender pay gap. Women were three times more likely than men to explain that the wage gap was due to their underselling and undervaluing their services. Both men and women blamed wage secrecy.

Nearly half of all women surveyed (47%) have felt the need to hide their parenting responsibilities from their clients for fear that it will impact their pay. That’s compared to 14% of men who have felt the same. Those fears are not unfounded: studies have found that mothers are much less likely than women and men without children to be recommended for employment.

Honeybook’s findings on the gender wage gap echo those of an earlier study by Arianne Renan Barzilay and Anat Ben-David of pricing on an online platform. That study found that women’s requested hourly rate was 37% lower than men’s, even after the researchers controlled for experience and occupational category and feedback scores.

So what can be done? Sure, women could be individually coached and encouraged to ask for more money for their services (that is a better solution than encouraging men to charge less). Honeybook has a list of other steps, such as taking your business seriously and crunching your numbers to figure out what you need.

While those steps may be useful, the problem goes well beyond individual women (or men). As Nancy Levit, a law professor at UMKC explains, responding to the gender pay gap should be an issue of institutional, rather than individual, responsibility. This means exploring broader solutions.

Renan Barzilay has recently been looking into how inequality is being recreated in platform work and potential solutions. First, she says, we need to understand that gender discrimination in the labor market is casting a shadow on interactions in the gig economy and is enabling the dynamic of women's undervaluation. This is because women have long been "taught" to earn less in the labor market, and so if we are adamant about striving for gender equality in the gig economy, we need to be simultaneously concerned with ways to enhance women's equality in the general labor market.

Second, platforms may have a role to play in the cultivation or destabilization of gender inequality in the gig economy. Platforms’ technological architecture may condition some of the interactions hosted, and the algorithms they use may “(re)produce biases.”

Solutions thus need to focus on the platforms themselves. That means, for example, including more transparency, so that women know what others are charging for the same services. The platforms could publish reasonable hourly rates, or suggest hourly rates to users.

And finally, moving forward means figuring out how to challenge gender discrimination throughout the broader labor market.

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