Research News  |  08/01/2019

New Study on Gender Wage Gaps – Opportunities in Growing Online Labor Markets

Yes, indeed – women and men are different. Recent Max Planck research on one of the world’s largest online labor market platforms finds that gender wage gaps can largely be explained by gender-specific behavior in the competition for contracts. Yet, online labor markets could help female workers to obtain a higher expected income.

Photo: Myriam Rion.

For this purpose, a sample of more than 250,000 digitally performable projects from 188 countries with more than 2.5 million wage bill proposals of 65,010 freelancers from 177 countries was analyzed.


Female freelancers are willing to complete projects at a lower wage than their male competitors – which largely explains the observed gender wage gap. However, the analysis also shows that female freelancers are more likely than their male competitors to win the competition for contracts. Overall, this leads to a higher expected wage for female freelancers when making wage bill proposals.


One possible implication of the new Max Planck study by Frank Mueller-Langer, Affiliated Research Fellow at the Institute, and his co-author Estrella Gómez-Herrera, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, is that online labor markets could help female workers to obtain a higher expected income.


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