Uber May Be Paying Women Less for Driving Better

Uber is trying to defeat the gender pay gap by relying on an algorithm that has no idea whether drivers are men or women. But is it working? A recent paper studying more than a million drivers reached a conclusion: not so much. Men earn about 7 percent more than women do, as it turns out.

This could be taken as proof that -- just as Google engineer James Damore wrote in a memo that got him fired -- women are just different from men, and they do things differently at work. More likely, however, the situation is an example of our excessive trust in flawed algorithms that perform important functions, determining, for example, how work is rewarded.