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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