Digit Debates: The Gender Wage Gap in an Online Labour Market: The Cost of Interruptions

20 October 2021

1:00pm-2:00pm

Summary

Why do women earn less than men on Amazon Mechanical Turk? In this talk, Abi Adams-Prassl discusses her research analysing gender differences in working patterns and wages on the popular online labour platform. Using information on 2 million tasks, she found no gender differences in task selection nor experience. Nonetheless, women earn 20% less per hour on average. Adams-Prassl shows that gender differences in working patterns are a statistically and economically significant driver of this wage gap. Women are more likely to interrupt their working time on the platform with consequences for their task completion speed. A follow up survey shows that the gender differences in working patterns and hourly wages are concentrated amongst workers with children.

Bio

Abi Adams-Prassl is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Oxford. She is the co-founder of the Covid Inequality Project and a Specialist Advisor to the UK Parliament Women and Equalities Select Committee on the economic impact of the pandemic. Her research has been published in the leading outlets in Economics, Law and Computer Science and she was recently elected to the Governing Council of the Royal Economic Society.

Event