Women and Coffee Shops
There’s been an interesting little bit of research published recently. By staking out of series of coffee shops the researchers were able to show that women, on average, waited longer for their drinks than men did. Now note that this was the time between the order being taken and the order being delivered to the thirsty customer. The extra wait was only 20 seconds, but that’s 24% of the total wait, and as the researcher explains here at Tim Harford’s blog, that’s the important point about it. Not the time itself, but the thought that if there’s as much as 24% discrimination in many such small markets then we do indeed have a problem that needs explaining.
No one is quite sure why the discrimination happens: it disappears if there are only female baristas then there is no discrimination. So it’s clearly something male baristas do to women customers. But why? For only if we know why can we decide whether to do anything about it or even what to do if we should so wish to.
That thought in itself sometimes gets economists given strange looks. Surely, if there is discrimination, we’d want to do something about it? Well, no, perhaps not. The next question is whether the discrimination is rational or not. Think of the gender pay gap. Certainly it was true in the past that at least some of it was explained by irrational prejudice (married women often were not allowed to work, only certain careers were open and so on) but we think now that most (if not all) of the current gender pay gap is explained by the fact that it is women who have children. And that it is rational for employers to offer less money to those with children of the liklihood of having them. If such people are less productive, or more expensive to employ, then logically their wages will be lower.
So what we want to know about the coffee shop story is why the discrimination? Only then can we work on whether we want to do something about it or not. And unfortunately, at the moment we don’t know. Research, as they say, is ongoing.
November 25th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
First I’d have to ask where are the results of this ‘study’? How many people participated? If one woman and one man conducted this study, there could be problems with the data:
1. What if the man was unattractive and the woman attractive? A female coffee server would be no more motivated to keep the guy around longer than to keep the woman around. A male coffee server might want to make conversation with the pretty woman, but want to be quickly rid of the (ugly) guy so he has more time to talk with (pretty) women.
2. Even if both man and woman were attractive, a coffee server guy is more likely to try to spark up a conversation with an attractive woman than a coffer server woman will try to talk with an attractive man. Because whether in coffee shops, grocery stores, or walking down streets, men hit on women more than women hit on men. (Of course, the first two only account for heterosexual males/females.)
3. What if the woman was chatty and flirtatious and the man quiet and stand-offish, or we could say empathizer and systemizer?
4. What if the woman had very large breasts? I once knew of 2 guy teachers who would send big-boobed girls to eachother to deliver pencils just for the laugh and the view.
These are only 4 of many possible problems here.
December 15th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
All entirely relevant questions and yes, all of those things would indeed make a difference to the results.
From memory, the actual experimenters weren’t the people ordering the coffees. Rather, they went into coffee shops and observed the regular clientele as they ordered their coffees. So while there might have been bias for the reasons you mention, I don’t think there actually was. The other thing was that the sample was fairly large. 200-300 people as I recall, which is actually quite large for social science.
So yes, I think you’re asking the right questions, it’s just in this instance that I think the researchers can answer them properly.