{"id":36,"date":"2007-11-12T00:08:27","date_gmt":"2007-11-12T06:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/2007\/11\/12\/coffee-shop-discrimination\/"},"modified":"2007-11-12T00:08:27","modified_gmt":"2007-11-12T06:08:27","slug":"coffee-shop-discrimination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/2007\/11\/12\/coffee-shop-discrimination\/","title":{"rendered":"Coffee Shop Discrimination"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m always a little suspicious of research studies looking for discrimination in a competitive market.\u00a0 So, when I read Tim Hartford’s piece<\/a> over at Slate examining research out of Middlebury College<\/a> on whether coffee shops discriminate against women, I wanted to take a look at the study.<\/p>\n

Caitlin Myers from Middlebury College had five undergraduate students stake out coffee shops in the Boston area and take detailed notes on how long different customers had to wait for their order.\u00a0 Women have a tendency of not only ordering fancier drinks than men, but also including special requests with their orders.<\/p>\n

“In this case [not accounting for special requests], the positive coe\ufb03cient for female would be the result not of discrimination but of unobserved order complexity.”<\/em><\/p>\n

In order to avoid this problem, the authors examined whether male employees might be responsible for longer female wait times.\u00a0 Neither “proportion female employees”, nor\u00a0 “interaction of female customer and proportion female employees” were statistically significant at the 5 percent level\u00a0 (although the coefficients indicated greater discrimination).\u00a0 In the authors’ words:<\/p>\n

“In a co\ufb00ee shop with all male employees, a female customer waits
\nan average of 37 seconds longer for her order than a male customer. However, in
\na co\ufb00ee shop with all female employees a female customer\u2019s wait is estimated to
\nbe 7 seconds longer than that of a male, a di\ufb00erential which is not statistically
\nsigni\ufb01cantly di\ufb00erent from zero. Although the coe\ufb03cient on the interaction
\nterm is not signi\ufb01cant (with a p-value of 0.31), the result is suggestive that it is
\nnot order type but rather some action on the part of employees that is driving
\nthe result.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Fair enough.\u00a0 I don’t doubt that male employees take slightly longer than their female counterparts to serve women customers.\u00a0 Why might this be?\u00a0 Myers speculates:<\/p>\n

“However, the source of such discrimination is not
\nclear. One possibility is animus<\/a>-based discrimination on the part of male co\ufb00ee
\nshop employees who wish to impose higher costs on female customers. On the
\nother hand, these longer waits presumably mean more time spent associating
\nwith the waiting women, which may o\ufb00set any utility gains prejudiced employees
\nreceive from imposing greater costs on female customers. Another possibility is
\nthat rather than re\ufb02ecting ill-will towards female customers, the di\ufb00erential is
\nindicative of male servers garnering utility from interacting or being near female
\ncustomers. In this case, the di\ufb00erential re\ufb02ects not a desire to impose a cost on
\nwomen but rather to spend time \ufb02irting, chatting with, or just being around
\nthem.”<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, men are out to get women and can exercise their animosity but taking an extra 30 seconds to brew that cappuccino.\u00a0 Or, male employees hoping for a future date, waste women’s valuable time.\u00a0 The study goes so far as to use Massachusetts’ median-wage to estimate the lost earnings due to discrimination: approximately 10 cents per drink.<\/p>\n

The study to a certain extent concedes, and I suspect, that extra requests are the root cause of wait differentials.\u00a0 However, going to a coffee shop is about more than just getting your drink as quickly as possible. Talking with the barista is part of the experience, and will increase wait time. Is it really surprising that women might engage in this aspect of the experience more than men do?<\/strong>\u00a0 I have never worked at a traditional coffee shop but I did spend a month working at a snack bar that sold coffee.\u00a0 I found women significantly more chatty than men.\u00a0 It isn’t hard to image that they might be more talkative with male baristas than females.\u00a0 Surely, male baristas aren’t the only ones looking for dates.<\/p>\n

The study also acknowledges past research suggesting that women tip less than men. Although, I doubt the difference is large enough to have much impact on service ex ante.\u00a0 I know at least one reader of this blog has significant work experience at a coffee shop.\u00a0 Any thoughts?<\/p>\n

Notes:<\/strong>\u00a0 The study found no statistically significant discrimination of blacks.\u00a0 Also, almost exactly 50 percent of the sample was female.\u00a0 Tim Hartford’s anticdotle observation<\/a> that many of his female colleagues don’t drink coffee doesn’t seem to be representative of Boston’s coffee market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m always a little suspicious of research studies looking for discrimination in a competitive market.\u00a0 So, when I read Tim Hartford’s piece over at Slate examining research out of Middlebury College on whether coffee shops discriminate against women, I wanted to take a look at the study. Caitlin Myers from Middlebury College had five undergraduate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college","category-economics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}