My column describing the research on gender discrimination in coffee shops has drawn a lot of comments via email (about a zillion people saw it on Slate, apparently) both to me and to the author of the paper, Caitlin Myers. The comments fall into several categories:

1. The behaviour described has a benign explanation (baristas take more care over drinks, for instance)
2. We don’t trust the results because there is a small sample size.
3. This is not a very important finding - only 20 seconds extra wait for women.
4. Tim Harford is an idiot.

Caitlin Myers is not qualified to pronounce on (4) but she has very kindly shared a thoughtful response to (1), (2) and (3). It’s a couple of pages long so it’s below the fold, but recommended for those interested in the work.

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Today’s column was about sexual discrimination at your local coffee shop, based on research by Caitlin Knowles Myers [pdf]. Sarah Black and Elizabeth Brainerd found evidence that competition does reduce discrimination. Chris Dillow’s blog alerted me to the paper. Gary Becker’s Nobel lecture is perhaps the best online discussion of his economic theory of discrimination. And I regret that there was no space in the article to mention the Sexpresso trend.

Felix Salmon thinks so:

Besides, I reckon that ad revenues can make up for lost subcription   revenues. According to Dow Jones, WSJ.com gets 8.3 million unique visitors a   month, and would need to raise that number to something over 20 million uniques   in order to keep total revenues constant. Never mind the accuracy of the numbers,   the key thing here is the percentage increase: readership would have to go up   by about 140%. Slate’s readership went up by many multiples of that after it   went free, and I reckon the WSJ’s would as well. People looking for financial   news right now don’t visit WSJ.com because they know it’s a pay site. If they   know it’s free, it could easily become the first best source for all financial   news and analysis online.

The New York Times recently went (almost entirely) free online, of course, and FT.com is offering free material to infrequent browsers. I’ve written a piece about these questions for FT Magazine, but confounded dead-tree deadlines means it won’t appear here until 20 October. But here’s a hint: I’ve been looking at the work of this man.

Further reading for this weekend’s Undercover Economist column: Jacob Loshin’s paper, Secrets Revealed; Fauchart and Von Hippel on French Chefs; James Surowiecki has a nice column on related issues for the fashion industry.