Uber hates women! But really, this is super-interesting research: some researchers compared the earnings of men and women in an environment with an objective and gender-neutral reward algorithm.
They ruled out standard explanations like systematic bias and working time flexibility and yet still found a pay-gap of around 7%.
The gap was explained by: 30% experience (men have drive for Uber for a longer time and know which rides are good), 20% working time (men do take some rides during higher paying slots, but so do women), and 50% men drive around 2% faster.
Amusingly, a tipping economy benefits women (tipping favors women by 10-30%) but hurts the working force as a whole (tipping causes a larger body of workers, which lowers prices).
This all of course doesn’t really generalize to anything, but it’s cool to see that a mobile app economy can benefit research like this.
…and I seem to recall somebody else doing a study based on Uber data a couple of years ago. That too was interesting, but evidently not sufficiently so that I remember who did it or what it was about. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about-the-gender-pay-gap/