Soliciting advice is an effective strategy not only when we are facing a difficult task but also when we have made a mistake or experienced failure or conflict. In her Ph.D. thesis, published in 2010, organizational behavior scholar Katie A. Liljenquist, then at Northwestern University, had M.B.A. students engage in a simulated performance review. When those playing the role of a junior manager received a surprisingly negative performance review and asked for advice on how to improve, those playing their bosses considered them to be more likable and competent than those who did not. Similarly, Liljenquist found that when facing conflict in negotiations, asking your counterpart for advice increases perspective taking, leading to a more rapid and likely resolution of the conflict.
Another unfounded assumption is the fear that people will refuse requests for information or assistance, leaving us embarrassed. In research published in 2008 organizational behavior researcher Francis Flynn and social psychologist Vanessa Bohns, both then at Columbia University, told participants to ask for favors in campus settings after estimating how many people they thought would comply with their requests. The favors included borrowing a stranger’s cell phone to make a call, soliciting individuals to fill out questionnaires, and asking students to help locate the campus gym and walk at least two blocks toward it. Participants estimated that they would have to ask 50 percent more people than they actually needed to ask.
The power of advice seeking has limits. For example, in one of our recent studies we asked people to identify areas of personal strength and weakness, such as their knowledge of sports, musical instruments or geography. Next, an experimenter approached them for advice in their area of self-identified weakness. The nonexperts were perplexed by these requests and viewed the asker as less competent for seeking their help. This makes sense: you cannot stroke someone’s ego when they are 100 percent sure they are not knowledgeable about a topic. Yet in a final study in the same paper, we found that even asking for advice on a very easy task—although it did not increase judgments of competence—did not harm evaluations either. Asking for advice is not nearly as risky an endeavor as we tend to think.
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See, Uber sort of has a woman problem. The company, which created an app by which professional and amateur drivers can sign up to drive around passengers for a fee, is facing complaints by its female customers, that drivers have sexually harassed them—or even, in one lurid case, kidnapped and raped them. An executive with the company had to apologize after making statements at a party about digging up personal dirt on a female journalist. Perhaps Uber has some business reasons to promote itself as a woman-friendly company.
So Uber will fix its problems by hiring women to drive for it. One million women, if its press release, with a big blinking “1,000,000” at the top, is to be believed. Though Uber doesn’t even have a million drivers yet, and is a little unclear on how it plans to achieve this lofty goal, its release—co-signed by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and UN Women executive director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka—declares that Uber and the UN will “work together around the world toward a shared vision of equality and women’s empowerment,” and “invest in long-term programs in local communities where we live and work.”
“Hiring” is a bit of a stretch since the company both expects drivers to pass background checks and also counts its drivers as “independent contractors.” That means that rather than being employees who are eligible for benefits like health care, family leave, and paid vacation, its workers make what they are paid for each individual ride, less Uber’s cut. They are also responsible for providing and maintaining their own cars. The benefit for drivers is that they can turn off the app when they don’t feel like working, allowing them to make their own schedule and perhaps drive part-time while holding down another job or doing other freelance work. The downside is that there is little protection or support for drivers.
A group of California Uber drivers have even filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that they are misclassified—that they fit the legal definition of employees, not independent contractors, and thus are owed compensation for the costs of doing business that they have so far been footing. In addition, the suit [PDF] also claims that Uber prevents the drivers from getting tipped by telling customers gratuity is included and then not turning over to drivers the total tip.
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There’s little sharing about this sharing economy. Uber is not a “ride-sharing” app; as its press release touting the jobs it will create attests, it is a company that hires employees to do a job. Its major innovation is the creation of an app—which, Mike Konczal at The Nation points out, isn’t actually that hard to build and even easier to maintain once built.
The thing is, as I’ve written elsewhere, these jobs aren’t new. They’re putting a shiny high-tech futuristic gloss on old practices like piecework—women of a century ago used to assemble garments at home, paid by the piece rather than by the time it took to do the work—and temporary labor. The temp industry in particular, as sociologist Erin Hatton writes in her book The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America, got its start by exploiting sexist stereotypes of women workers. Temp work, in other words, has always been gendered.
Kelly Girl Services (now just Kelly Services) promoted its “girls” as flexible part-time workers who would show up when you needed them and disappear when they didn’t. Women, the theory was, didn’t need full-time secure work because they had men for that. They just needed a bit of pin money to buy some little extras. The flexibility that has now become a major selling point for app-based gig systems like Uber and TaskRabbit was always expected of women.
Women too have historically been expected to do the jobs that require emotional labor and personal service. While taxi-driving and Uber driving are currently dominated by men, Uber in particular gives its customers a lot of power by allowing them to rate their drivers—a poor rating might lead to the driver getting fired. Drivers have to put on a smile and pretend they’re having a great time even if their passenger is a jerk. If it becomes a selling point for Uber that it has female drivers, driving strangers around in their personal vehicles for a fee, it is easy to imagine what kind of male customers that might attract and what boundaries might disappear, encouraged by cuddly “sharing economy” branding.
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