Late one night in June, Jody was in her car driving down a long wooded road in southern Maine. Jodi Paglioco drives for Uber and left. She had a passenger in the front seat. She picked him up from a bar in town and was taking him home. She says he seemed drunk. The road was dark and there was nobody around. Jody was getting uncomfortable, and he made a
joke about not meaning a serial killer. But then he started talking about sexual stuff and everything, and all I could think of what am I going to do if he does anything else, or if he tried to grab me or touch me. She wanted to let him out of the car right then and there, but she had to drive to a safe location. I ended up getting him to the front gates of his place. I told him it was time for him to get out, and I told him I wasn't driving him need for alert.
The man got out of the car and left. Jody says she was relieved that nothing else happened to her that night, but it left her scared and shaken, and then shortly after she had another incident with a passenger. You know, I thought the car and everything, doors are unlocked, he opens the door and then he reaches and tries to grab me and kissed me. So you've only been driving for six months. How many times do you think you've been put in an uncomfortable or inappropriate situation like that?
I think she's um. I got almost a thousand rides under my belt between Uber and Left. As much as I hate to say it, I would say probably about two vos. Hi, I'm Brad Stone and I'm Selena Wang. And this week on Decrypted, we're exploring the gender dynamics
of the gig economy. These jobs were supposed to help level the playing field in the modern economy, offering away, for example, for mother's juggling childcare responsibilities to work with flexible hours, and while that promise of flexibility is what drew them in, many women like Jody who drive for services like Uber and Left say they frequently encountered harassment, even assault by male passengers, and that those conditions have in turn put them out a disadvantage to mail drivers.
Later in the episode will dive deep into what the economic research says about all this and what Uber and Left are doing in response. Stay with us Selena over the past few weeks, You've been talking to quite a few women in the gig economy. So tell us about Joe, who we heard from at the top of the show. So, Jody's thirty eight years old, grew up in Arizona and
has an associates degree. She's divorced with two kids. About four years ago, her daughter, who was seventeen at the time, was in a terrible accident that paralyzed her from waist down. Last year, Jody moved to Maine to be closer to where her daughter will be getting medical treatment. And since it's not exactly the easiest thing getting a job out here, and especially since I've spent the majority of my marriage
at home raising kids. I also have a seventeen year old son as well, and so yeah, I came out here and decided to do the thing. Jody typically drives that night from eight pm to three am, times when she says she can make the most money. A lot of her passengers are going home from bars and events. I do try and sing in at least eight hours a day, so that way, it's kind of like a full time job for me. I met Jody in a private Facebook group for mail lift and Uber drivers The
group has almost ten thousand members. It's a support group where women ask questions, give advice, and share their experiences driving on the platform, both positive and negative. Now, there's many reasons why women might decide to become Lift or Uber drivers, but one that I kept hearing how to do with childcare. A lot of the women I spoke
to were mothers. I just needed to make a little bit of extra money and I didn't have to find childcare if I like just I mean, they're not going to the restaurant's not going to judge you for having a baby on your hip. That's Hannah Mentor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia. She's twenty four and a single mother of two kids. She started doing food delivery part time to supplement her income, designing things like T shirts that
she sells on Etsy. And then when you drop off with Uber, the majority of the time they're walking up to the car and grabbing it from you. So I never had to worry about someone watching my kid because he was right there with me. You know. After a while, Hannah realized she could make more me by driving passengers for Uber and Lift, so I started branching out. Even though it's a little bit scary to drive strangers in your car. I slowly branded out into Uber and Lifts,
and since the money was just gotten much better. But driving for Uber and Lift came but a whole new set of risks that Hannah mostly didn't encounter while she was delivering food. If you're just dropping off food, you don't spend much time with the customers. It's it's pretty in and out. They don't really have the time to get to a point where they can do something inappropriate or something uncomfortable. Whereas with Uber and Lift, the passenger
is alone with you for at least several minutes. That's enough time for things to get weird. For example, just days before I spoke with Hannah at the end of November, she picked up a man who she said was drunk. It slowly progressed to him asking about my love life and then telling me about his girlfriend of a month, and then him well but surely like trying to ask
about what things I was into in the bedroom. And I finally got him to his destination, and when he tried when he went to get out of the car, and of course I'm relieved that he's getting out of my car at this point, um, he tried to like kiss my hand. And this kind of experience isn't unusual. Every day that I drive, every night that I drive,
there is at least one questionable experience. I hate to be the person that's like, I'm scared, but yeah, there's always a fear of having the wrong person get into your car, or someone that is not respectful, or someone that is completely drunk and just does not care. As I got deeper into reporting, I noticed that it wasn't just that these women had an uncomfortable experience. These experiences
led to real consequences. A lot of the women said that after a bad situation like the one we heard from from Hannah, they turned off the app and go home, even though they were planning on driving for longer. Some women told me it took them even a few days before they felt like driving again. Like Jody, who we heard from at the start of the show, There's been a few times where I've just been like I'm done,
I'm going to stop doing this. I gotta stop for the day because I'm like on edge because I'm thinking, okay, what happened. As the next guy that comes in my car drives this stuff. You know, I'm driving at night, taking people home from the bars and everything, and you know it's just I'm I have to take a break because I have to get back into, you know, a different mindset than what those other people leave me in. Turning off the app, even for just a few days,
definitely results in lost income. Going back to Hannah, the twenty four year old in Savannah, she told me it's because of those experiences that she isn't earning more money by driving more hours. Right now, she only drives between six and ten hours a week. I think the only thing keeping me from doing that with the it's terrible experiences that will turn you off from driving for a couple of days, or not even necessarily terrible, just just uncomfortable.
So these are women who were driving in the first place because they're looking for additional income, but now because of an experience that made them feel uncomfortable or in safe, they're not driving as much. And that means they're missing out on the flexibility and opportunity of the gig economy.
And that's one of the biggest economic trends of this decade. Okay, so so far, Selena, we've heard from Jody and Maine and Hannah and Georgia about their experiences in the gig economy, and many more women I spoke to for this story
seemed to have gone through similar experiences and made similar observations. Right, and if one of the big promises of work in the gig economy is that it suits women and men equally, and you know, maybe even has advantages for women who might value the flexibility so they could juggle work and family responsibilities, this kind of widespread harassment does seem to
undermine the entire promise of the job. And the thing is, it's not just the anecdotal evidence that's pointing to these disparities. Economists are looking at it too. The labor economists at Stanford called Paul Oyer co author to study published earlier this year titled the Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy.
He worked on it with two other economics professors, as well as Uber's chief economist and Uber's data scientist at the time, what we are very interested in in the gig economy initially was and still are interested in us is it seems like a very good place, relatively speaking, for women because they might value the flexibility of choosing their own hours more. Paul worked with Uber to study a sample of more than one million drivers in the US between January and March. They found that men earned
approximately seven percent more than women. So what explains that difference? So there were three big factors. One was a difference in driving speed. On average, men drive two point two percent faster than women, so they finished trips at a faster rate, which enlarges the pay gap. It's ironic and perhaps misdirected that the men are being compensated for driving faster right than perhaps less safely. We don't know for sure in the data, but it's certainly boosting their earnings. Okay,
So what was the second factor. The second factor was the difference in where male and female drivers were picking up their passengers. One thing that works against women as Uber drivers is they live in neighborhoods and artists lucrative, and therefore they end up driving in neighborhoods at artists lucrative. Okay, I don't understand this. Break this down a little bit.
Why is that The data doesn't point to exactly why, but it did show that women Uber drivers tended to live in lower income neighborhoods, which means that the areas they're driving in don't earn them as much money. And the research also found that men were more willing to pick up people in neighborhoods with higher crime rates and with more drinking establishments. Okay, and what's the last factor
that might explain the pay gap? The third factor was experienced, So, like any profession, the more experienced someone has, the more they make. And Paul found that on average, men were driving longer hours per week and they were also less likely to stop driving for Uber altogether, and that meant they were accumulating more experience as Uber drivers, like learning when and where to drive and how to strategically cancel and accept trips that allowed them to earn higher rates
on the platform. Economists call that human capital. Yeah, and that reminds me of what Jody and Hannah told us earlier, how they would stop driving for the night or even a few days after they had a bad experience. They're not only earning less because they're working fewer hours, but over time, they're missing out on the experiences so that they can earn more per hour to begin with, right, And that seemed to be paulse hunch too. So, um, there's some other things going on on this platform that
make it more attractive for men for women. UM, I don't you know. I don't know if women don't feel us. I can't speak to this. I don't see that data. But you know, you could imagine they don't feel it's safe. You could imagine. Paul's big conclusion was this, even though it's great that these big economy jobs offer flexible work arrangements for women, that flexibility on its own isn't enough to close the gap between what women earn and what
men earn. So Selena, I guess the next question is what are Uber and Left doing to tackle this well. First of all, Uber and Left both allowed drivers to report incidents in the app or through call line. For example, in that story we heard from Jody at the beginning, where a man was making her uncomfortable on a night drive. She reported that to Uber afterwards, and she told me that she's reported many many other incidents for being solicited
for sex or for drugs. And what happens after a driver reports someone Joe He has said that in the past when she's made a report, the company told her she wouldn't be paired with the person again, and supposedly they will kick them off the flat, they'll investigate. It is what they always tell me, and usually I don't hear anything else from that except for you you won't
be paired from with them again. However, I have ran into those people that I've been told I won't be paired with again, and still seeing them ordering Uber rides being picked up by other Uber drivers. Do you think Uber and Lift do enough to help women who are put in situations like this? Absolutely not. I don't. I really wholeheartedly believe that they've done slowly, and I find this to be outrageous. I mean, don't you think that there should be just a zero tolerance policy that these
apps have towards passengers who act this way? Well, certainly, the sentiment from the women I spoke to is that there's a very high bar for conduct it comes to drivers, but for passengers, since they want as many writers as possible, the bar is pretty low, and you have to do something pretty terrible to get permanently. But in this case, the customer is not always right exactly. And I mean, even though Jodie has reported a lot of these incidents,
many women don't. A lot of the ones I spoke to said they're worried that if they report their passengers for grasping them or even just rebuffing their advances in person, the passengers will retaliate by giving them a bad rating, report them for a serious infraction like drunk driving, and that has serious consequences for the drivers, like getting suspended from driving for multiple days while they conduct an investigation.
They could even get kicked off the platform altogether. And many drivers depend on that income to pay their bills. So what do Uber and Left have to say about all this? So I spoke to Uber's head of safety and consumer protection policy, Stephanie Bryson. One of the most impactful things is that really the tone from the top has changed. She's referring to Uber's change in management dar
Causra Shah. He became CEO last year, taking over from Travis Kalinik, and when Dara came in, he did a full review of the business, as you would expect any CEO to do, and coming out of that review, he said that we should commit to safety being the top priority of the company, and the company has really fallen in line behind that new safety features include this emergency button that connects drivers to nine one one, and a feature that makes it easier to share trips with friends
and family. The company also eliminated forced arbitration agreements for employees, riders, and drivers who make sexual assault or harassment claims against the company, So that means that instead of resolving any legal claims in an arbitration hearing, people can actually take those claims to court. Stephanie also explained to me how
Uber evaluates reports on inappropriate behavior from passengers. When a report does come in, UH, that is, it goes into our reporting flow and UH those instances that are safety related are flagged to a special team, and that team has received special training on trauma informed techniques as well as other training on handling sensitive or high sensitivity incidents,
and it goes through a process of follow up. If it is a high severity incident, we will usually undertaken investigation two, speak with both sides of the encounter and trying to discern the facts and then make make a call on what next steps need to be taken. Finally, I asked her about the fears from sub women drivers that they feel like they were being given unfair ratings.
If a driver feels that they were given an unfair rating as some kind of retaliation, it's really important that they report that to Uber so that we can take steps to make that right. Lift has similar features to Uber, though the company declined to offer anyone from the company to speak with me for the podcast, but in a written statement, the company said that safety is a top priority and that harassment isn't tolerated, and that that kind
of behavior can lead to a permanent ban. Lift also said that it's announcing fifteen new features by the end of this year, many of which focus on driver's safety. Selena, are they doing anything to tag all those more nuanced forces at work that are keeping women in a disadvantage, the kind of factors that Paul Oyle told us about, like women driving slower and this searning less money, or
the higher turnover rates for female drivers. So I did pose that question to Stephanie from Uber, and she mentioned that they have used that to help shape product decisions at a high level and they aren't done thinking about the studies findings, but she didn't have any specifics to tell me. So, Selena, is there anything that surprised you about your reporting. I was definitely surprised by the frequency
of inappropriate experiences that these women faced. I mean, by and large, these women enjoy the flexibility, they enjoy the money, they chose to start on this platform, and they realize that they have to deal with this issue and that is just a nature of doing the job. And it's almost so sort of reality check for them, and they feel like it's no choice, but it's a reality they have to face, just like in day to day life.
What do you think about these companies potentially using technology to solve one of the problems of their technology, So for example, making it easier for female drivers at night perhaps who might be feeling vulnerable in a in a certain neighborhood to solicit rides only from female passengers or female passengers, uh, from from just female drivers or like you know, a group that includes at least one female
as are the companies talking about anything like that. So that's actually something that d D the Uber of China, tried so after several incidents where female passengers were allegedly assaulted by male drivers, they only wanted to match women with women in late hours. But the problem with that was that it cost a shortage of drivers that were available to women, since d D obviously doesn't have as many female drivers, and this was something I thought was
really interesting. So on Uber, only about fifteen percent of the drivers are female, and on Lift is only about And if you look at the overall transportation industry, women actually make up a super small percentage of that and it's actually largely a result of safety concerts. So that's why there are so few women in the industry overall.
That reminds me a sleen of some Uber history. Back in two fifteen, Uber had announced this partnership with with the United Nations Right to create a million jobs for women by which of course is now basically a year away. So remind us what happened with that partnership. Yeah, what's interesting is that I think a lot of what I spoke to with these women's about are reflected in the ultimate decision of the U n which was to cancel
that partnership. I mean, just days after it was announced back in the International Transportation Federation published a letter saying Uber actually does not empower women, that it makes the labor market more and equal by denying people basic for tections like fair wages, job security and safety at work. So one of the women you talked to, I think was Hannah, said she was delivering food because of course then she doesn't need to put a passenger uh in
the backseat. She maybe just has a pizza back there. Is that Is that a reasonable solution for women who might feel unsafe driving for Uber and left to just do another take another job in the gig economy. It's true that a lot of the women did like food delivery for the fact that they could actually bring their kids with them, but by and large, pretty much every woman I spoke to you said it wasn't as lucrative and they weren't making as much money and that that's
why they were returning to Uber and left. Yeah, it's kind of a shame that the largest part of the gig economy would be off limits to some of the people who really need the flexibility and the earning opportunity
the most. But I'm curious from your perspective, I mean, with Travis being out of the company back when he was really criticized for not dealing with sexual craftsman internally and in terms of drivers safety, do you think is really ushering this new way that the company is telling me about, well, he you know, he's certainly presenting a
friendlier public face. But it goes back to one of the things that that some of our drivers told us about, which is that when they report bad behavior, they're not
certain that it's being punished. And the great promise not of the gig economy, but of these kind of feedback rating mechanisms that are ubiquitous on the internet, you know, is that actions have consequences, right, and if you get a bad rating because you're a passenger and you try to hold your driver's hand, there should be zero tolerance. You know, that should be recorded on your record, and
a future driver should know about it. And and you know, either you're out or drivers see it to see it in the form of a low rating and have the opportunity to decide not to pick you up. What it sounds like is that these companies are still so desperate for growth then they don't want to lose drivers, and they don't want to lose passengers that they're they're not enforcing their own enforcement mechanisms. So, Selena, before we finish up, what are Jody and Hannah's plans for the future. Do
they want to keep driving. Hannah told me she will keep on driving. It's not bad money, it's good money. Um, direct up quickly. You can have some really pleasant experiences. I'm gonna work from home mom. I'm around my children all the time. If you get social interaction with adults and not necessarily people that you would meet on a day to day basis. But Jody was less certain. Honestly,
I'm at the point where as I liked it. I love the flexibility and everything, but the money just isn't consistent in us, and I feel, you know, there's no benefits. You know, some days, yeah, I'm doing great by making hour, but some days I'm not doing so great and I'm making fries. I mean, I would much rather have a full time jobs, even if it means me having to give a notice three weeks at a time for a day off. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks
for listening. Are you a woman who drives for a lift or Ubert? We want to hear your story. You can email us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Selena underscore Y Underscore Way and I'm at brad Stone. If you're a fan of the show, please take a moment to rate and review us. It helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pio Gadkari and Liz Smith. Our story editor was Aki Edo. Thanks also to add Vandermay, Emily Busso, and
Magnus Hendrickson. Francesca Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. This is our last episode for the season. We're taking the next few weeks off to work on new episodes, but we'll be back again in the spring. See you in the new year.