The gig economy has experienced significant growth in recent years, driven in part by the availability of new platforms to connect organizations with freelance talent from across the world.  One might hope that such a meritocratic environment would encourage gender equality in terms of pay, but new research from Columbia University suggests not.

The researchers examined the work of around 20,000 gig workers, who had completed over 5 million different tasks online.  The analysis revealed a clear gender pay gap that was not explained by the demographics of the workers, their professional experience or the kind of tasks they performed.  This resulted in pay differences of around 10% between men and women.

“Our goal was to examine a highly unique labor environment, characterized by factors that should make this labor market relatively immune to the emergence of a gender pay gap. Nevertheless, our results showed evidence of a gender wage gap not fully accounted for by such factors as task heterogeneity, experience, and task completion speed,” the researchers say.

Gig work

Slight caveat from the start, in that the researchers found work-related data via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which while highly popular, does provide work in fairly low-skilled ways, so it’s not clear if the discrepancy applies equally in higher-skilled, higher-paid work via other platforms.

Nonetheless, through virtue of the anonymous and self-selecting nature of the work on the platform, the researchers didn’t expect to find any gender pay differentials.  The analysis, of around 5 million tasks completed over an 18-month period, contained data from 12,312 female workers and 9,959 male workers.   In total, they completed roughly half of the total number of tasks.  The pay gap seems to come in part because women were selecting jobs with lower pay.

“Women may select lower paying tasks because cumulative experiences of pervasive discrimination lead women to undervalue their labor. In turn, women’s experiences with earning lower pay compared to men on traditional labor markets may lower women’s pay expectations on gig economy markets. Therefore, consistent with these lowered expectations, women may be more likely than men to settle for lower paying tasks,” the researchers say.

This pay gap also seemed to endure, regardless of whether the men or women were listed as single or married, or indeed whether they had children or not.

“This study represents an important and novel contribution to the literature on the gender pay gap,” the researchers conclude. “Future research should explore the observed gender pay gap in this niche of the gig economy and seek to understand how it may both reflect broader gender inequalities and point to opportunities for structural remedies.”