Income On Ebay: Women Make Less Money On Ebay Than Men, New Study Reveals
If you’re wanting to make some good income on eBay, it’s ideal for men. A new study reveals that women make less money than men on eBay, an online auction site to sell various products and other items.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that findings from a study published in the Journal Science Advances show that women on average make about 80 cents for every dollar a man does when selling an identical “new” product.
The difference in eBay income is far less distinctive in used goods… women make 97 cents for every dollar on the same product sold by a man.
On eBay, women make 80% as much as men do for auctioning off the same products: https://t.co/mUFcQ4PDuq pic.twitter.com/NrPEzA03ge
— Science Magazine (@sciencemagazine) February 19, 2016
Data was used from the company, Tamar Kricheli-Katz, as well as a sociologist and legal scholar from Tel Aviv University, and Tali Regev, an economist from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. The collaboration analyzed U.S. sales of the 420 most popular products from the full list of eBay categories between 2009 and 2012.
Women did outsell men in certain categories, such as baby products and toys for pets. They earned higher “star” ratings, which amounted to better feedback from buyers.
Ebay doesn’t indicate a seller’s gender, but researchers in the study said buyers can easily learn a seller’s gender by a username and the other products being sold under that specific account.
“If I’m selling an iPhone, but also my shoes and a purse, it’ll be relatively easy to identify me as a woman,” says Kricheli-Katz in an interview. “And the more items I sell, the more accurately people can categorize me.”
The gender gap in eBay income for women versus women show the biases that still exist between men and women in terms of business. Buyers to some degree don’t place as much value on women sellers as they do men selling products.
Kricheli-Katz said researchers “expected to find a gap, but we were surprised at the magnitude, especially because the biggest effect was for new products where women and men are selling exactly the same thing.”
Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the New York Times that is where you’d think finding gender disparity would be the least significant.
“So we can interpret these data as a lower bound of what we can expect in other environments,” Babcock said.
The eBay income study for women further shows the wide gender gap that still takes place in the United States. Some studies show women are paid only 79 cents on the dollar on average compared with men performing the same job duties. What makes the eBay gap studies so different is there’s no basis for pay inequality when it comes to lack of experience and other underlying factors.
Ebay buyers spend 20 per cent less on items sold by women, study finds https://t.co/Fj9QxOwXDK pic.twitter.com/tta1uMh8av
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) February 20, 2016
Government studies have shown that as a whole, women earn 22 cents less than men on the dollar. Some economists aren’t so sure how much weight to put on those studies since they take issue with how the gender gap is determined. They declare that it’s not an accurate comparison because the metric is based on gross income and doesn’t account for everything else involved in why certain income disparities are present to begin with.
“The 77 cents per dollar metric is a comparison of gross income. That is, it compares the income of all men to the income of all women, without regard for other factors.” Abigail Hall, a research fellow at the Independent Institute and assistant professor of economics at the University of Tampa, said. “It’s literally like matching up a waitress with a high school degree and a CEO with two Master’s degrees and saying, ‘ah-ha! Their pay is unequal! Look at that waitress-CEO wage gap!'”
Are you shocked to learn that women earn less money on eBay than men when selling products?
[Bennett Raglin/AP Images for eBay]
