Successful sellers on eBay know certain things matter: item description, appealing photos, strong seller ratings and, of course, price.
Now, a study published on Friday in the journal Science suggested another factor might make a subtle difference: whether the seller is a man or woman. Using data supplied by the company, researchers analyzed about 630,000 auction transactions on eBay in the US and reported that, on average, when men and women with equal selling reputations sold the same products, women received lower prices than men.
The difference was far less pronounced for used items: Women sellers received about US$0.97 for every dollar men received. However, with new items, where the authors say direct comparison is easier, women received about US$0.80 on average for every dollar male sellers received.
“The basic point — that people have different expectations of women versus men, and so we treat them very differently in the world — it’s fascinating and depressing,” said Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved in the study.
“On eBay, wow,” she said, noting eBay’s fame as a forum where anyone can sell anything and which does not require that sellers identify their gender. “This would be kind of the best example where you would think that discrimination would be at its smallest. So we can interpret these data as a lower bound of what we can expect in other environments.”
The study did not paint a universally negative picture for women. For some items, like toys and pet products, women received somewhat higher prices than men. Women also tended to have better reputations as sellers although they tended to have less selling experience.
Nor did the study, which controlled for seller reputation, experience, number of photos, use of bold lettering and other elements, indicate that buyers were actively or even consciously discriminating. Male and female buyers appeared to treat female sellers the same, the authors said.
“We actually think that most of it is unconscious,” said Tamar Kricheli-Katz, a professor of law and sociology at Tel Aviv University, who conducted the study with Tali Regev, an economist at IDC Herzliya. “The fact is that most of us have biases. We hold them unconsciously, and it makes it difficult to change.”
Besides analyzing actual eBay transactions, the researchers conducted an experiment to see if people could tell the gender of sellers from user profiles. People guessed correctly in 1,127 of 2,000 cases, wrong in 170 and did not know the rest.
In another experiment, the study asked people to place value on a US$100 Amazon gift card sold by someone named either Alison or Brad. On average, Alison’s gift card was valued at US$83.34, while Brad’s was valued at US$87.42.
Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and expert on gender wage gaps, said the study was intriguing, but needed more analysis.
“Just perceiving that somebody’s a woman, what exactly does it mean?” she asked. “It’s got to mean something about the quality of the good or service or something that’s not captured in the data that they have.”
Without that additional information, Goldin said her hunch is that “the majority of people would be bidding less if they thought that, ‘This really isn’t a 1948 Rolex’ or ‘This really isn’t Jackie Robinson’s signature.’”
The researchers said eBay allowed them access to data on transactions, sellers and buyers, including gender. They evaluated transactions from 2009 to 2012, focusing on the 420 most popular items in eBay’s broader categories, and on auctions because no negotiation is involved. Sellers considered to be stores were excluded.
EBay did not provide financing for the study, but set conditions, according to the authors and to editors at Science. The researchers’ contract allowed eBay to approve any study before publication, mostly for potential disclosure of proprietary data and trade secrets; the authors said eBay “ended up approving the study without asking us to drop any of our results.”
EBay declined to discuss the specifics of the study with a reporter. In a statement, the company did not challenge the results.
“This study, which was based on data from more than four years ago, was not conducted or commissioned by eBay,” the statement said, adding: “We are passionate about harnessing our platform to empower millions of people by leveling the playing field for them. We do not reveal the gender of our sellers, although they can choose to do that themselves.”
Because the study computed averages, the experience of individual sellers might not match the trend, experts said. Indeed, when the New York Times, in reporting about the study, asked on Facebook if female eBay sellers felt that gender helped or hurt their sales, many people who posted responses said they felt gender was a nonissue on eBay.
“Price, shipping, description ... that’s what eBay buyers worry about,” wrote Susan Butler Carpenter, a former banker who is now a stay-at-home mother in Pennsylvania and an eBay seller for 16 years. “Anyone who says their gender as a woman has hurt or helped their sales is full of it. Why look for an issue where there is none?”
A few female sellers said they believed some buyers reacted differently because they were women.
Melanie Fodera, 21, a senior at Albion College in Michigan and a seller for about seven years, said when selling a Detroit Lions jersey for “US$100 or best offer,” she was offered US$50.
“I countered US$75, and their message to me was: ‘You don’t know what this is worth because you’re a girl,’” said Fodera, who usually sells women’s clothes and has an eBay page decorated with roses.
Another Facebook commenter, Justina Gilliam, posted: “It all depends on what I’m selling, really. I don’t sell often, but I’ve gotten men who think they can take advantage when I list sports tickets/memorabilia and women who get upset if I can’t answer intricate details about a Lladro that was given to me, but I’m getting rid of because I don’t care for it.”
In the 631,516 auctions the authors analyzed, women were about 23 percent of sellers. They received, on average, 0.88 fewer bids for the same items, the authors said. New items, where researchers found the largest gender gap, accounted for 78,350 sales. The biggest advantage for male sellers occurred in categories like new video games (the gap was especially huge for Nintendo Wii).
The authors analyzed the text sellers used, finding that women used slightly more positive language, saying “works great” more often than “never used,” for example, Regev said. However, wording differences did not account for the price gap.
Cecilia Ridgeway, a gender issues expert at Stanford, said when reading the study, “I did not think: ‘Oh, eBay needs to fix this.’ I don’t think this is a key thing we’ve got to do for gender equality.”
Still, she said she viewed the study as an indicator of “the importance of gender as a way of making sense of any human being. That doesn’t mean people endorse these beliefs; they just know them.”
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the