Hello! みんなさん今日は！
My name is Eureka Foong and I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College in the University of Tokyo
and I'm excited to share with you a study that I conducted with Liz
Gerber while I was a student at Northwestern University.
The growing online gig economy provides ways for women to participate in a flexible
remote workforce and close the offline gender pay and participation gap.
Online labor marketplaces, like Upwork, allow freelancers to work anywhere and anytime
by bidding on jobs and stating their desired bill rate.
While women in online labor marketplaces earn about as much
overall as men, women set lower bill rates.
This suggests gender differences in pricing strategies.
Prior work in HCI suggests that many factors, like work experience, time on platform, and
employer feedback, can affect employers' hiring decisions, but we don't yet know how workers
take these factors into account and whether gender plays a role.
In this study, we surveyed 392 freelancers in the United States on the popular marketplace platform,
Upwork, to understand strategies used to set hourly bill rates
and how gender and job category might relate to these pricing strategies.
I'm excited to tell you what we found and it's not what you would expect.
First, we conducted a pilot survey with seven freelancers on Upwork
in the US and a literature review of strategic marketing research
which revealed seven types of pricing strategies freelancers use.
One is the value-based pricing strategy or choosing a rate based on the value
that a product or service would bring to customers or one's unique qualities.
As one participant described,
"I feel that I am an accomplished designer that would command a premium rate."
We predicted that men would find value-based pricing more important than women;
in the past men have been found to have higher salary expectations than women
because they perceive bringing more value to the labor market.
We then conducted a larger survey of 392 freelance writers and designers in the US on Upwork.
So how might pricing strategies account for gender differences in freelancers' bill rates?
Surprisingly, they do not play as big a role as we thought.
We must look beyond pricing strategies to understand gender rate gaps.
We did not find gender differences in pricing strategies that were
significantly related to bill rate.
For example, controlling for factors like work experience and education, both men and women
found value-based pricing strategies equally important when choosing their bill rates.
And yes--value-based pricing predicted higher rates.
The only pricing strategy with gender differences was demand-based pricing;
women were more likely than men to consider the number and the type of clients they got
when they had set a higher or lower rate in the past.
However, demand-based pricing had no significant observable impact
on bill rate in our linear regression.
If gender differences in pricing strategies aren't influencing
bill rates in the way we thought they would, what does influence bill rates?
What predicted higher rates was having a bachelor's degree, being a full-time freelancer,
finding freelance work at least somewhat important as a source of income,
and having higher self-esteem.
What's really interesting is that women were less likely than men to be freelancing full-time,
and female writers were less likely to see freelancing as an important source of income.
So what does this mean?
For researchers, don't just look at pricing strategies to understand gender rate gaps online.
Consider other variables like full-time or part-time status
and how important freelancing is as a source of income.
For designers of platforms like Upwork,
consider nudging workers with below average rates to reflect on their unique qualities.
Help all workers regardless of gender
choose profitable bill rates based on their level of expertise.
Create tools to increase the transparency of rate gaps
similar to how websites display average salaries for employees on Glassdoor.
For policymakers, offer legal protections on online workers' pay rates,
like a minimum rate for part-time jobs, and protect workers against bill rate discrimination.
Of course, although we focused on binary gender differences in pricing behavior here,
I want to acknowledge the marginalization of non-binary and transgender workers in various
work practices, not just pricing, in the labor market that warrants a deeper investigation.
In short, to support equity in the online gig economy, CHI researchers
must identify and continue to assess the complex relationship
between gender and these factors in online labor marketplaces.
Thank you to the National Science Foundation, Northwestern University,
and Adobe Research for their generous funding and support of this work.