Breaking Gender Discrimination with Task Attention

The continuum model of impression formation suggests that attention can regulate the extent to which decision-makers use stereotypes or personal attributes, and that increased attention to the individual makes decision makers more inclined to use personal attributes, thus weakening the impact of stereotypes on negative groups. In this study we consider three task attributes that affect employers’ attention in the online gig market: task complexity, task selection ratio, and appropriateness of self-description. We collected data from Upwork.com, a popular online gig marketplace, and tested our hypothesis using negative binomial regression. The results show that task difficulty and task selection ratio can effectively mitigate gender discrimination in the online gig economy market. In addition, an appropriate self-description that includes more personal experience and professional information and less sentiment information also has a mitigating effect on gender discrimination under the circumstance of employment platformization.