I’ve found that the same thing happens at crowded bars. Granted I haven’t done any formal study, but over the years it has become pretty obvious.

I just assume that the bartender looked out at the crowd and instead of patrons saw potential tips writ on our alcoholic foreheads and selected his next customer based on the odds of getting a good tip. I also assume most people believe women tip lower. So, I sigh and wait a little longer for my Dewars.

The conundrum I then face is in deciding how much I should tip. Do I tip low or nothing because I was ignored, thus perpetuating the myth that woman are niggardly tippers? Or do I tip high, thus rewarding the bartender’s bad service?

Honestly I haven’t taken any one tack consistently. I generally always tip because I did at one time work in the service industry. And sometimes, depending on my mood, I tip high hoping that perhaps the bartender will think twice when the next woman approaches.

You could try pre-tipping the bartender to show that you're a good tipper, and you'll probably get good service:

<link>

As a person who used to bartend professionally, I find your assertions categorically unlikely, especially if the places you
claim bad service is in popular venues and clubs.

For starters, owners of these bars and clubs make one thing very clear to every employee: women get preference. Why? Because if there are no women in a popular club, there will be no men. The reasons for this should be clear to anyone, so if a patron complained they received poor service because of her sex, the offending server would be out the door.

Also, your broad assumption that bartenders only see potential tips when they decide on who they should serve next reveals a keen misunderstanding about club bartending: it's not a restaurant, where a relationship exists between server and patron. A club bar is a little more than a hip feeding trough. You shout your order, you get your drink, and you pay. Most bartenders don't even stop to consider who tips them, let alone if they feel they've been stiffed. Why? Because bartenders are very, very busy. They have no time to be worried about bad tippers.

A club is a very different place behind the bar: you don't see people as individuals. You are trying to serve dozens, if not hundreds of people simultaneously. You look for clues: does that person have cash in hand, ready to pay? They get preference. Is that person being a pushy jerk, yelling out his order when he knows I'm not ready to serve him? He isn't getting served, at least not by me, in any sort of timely fashion.

It's studies like these that make professional work in the service industry even more demeaning than it already is: poorly crafted, scientifically dubious
surveys that do nothing but feed some dated notion of victimhood in the service industry.

This is not true. Male bartenders overwhelmingly prefer to server female customers. It's usually the case that when I'm waiting to be served at a bar, the bartender will serve any woman who is waiting before getting to me, even if I have been waiting much longer than her. If you find yourself being discriminated against at a bar in favor of other customers, it's probably because they are friends with the bartenders or they spend all of their nights at the place.

I'd like to point out that Tim Harford has completely misrepresented Gary Becker's analysis, as well as trivializing it. Becker, in his book (not article) The Economics of Discrimination, most emphatically did not argue that competition eliminates discrimination. What he pointed out was that competitive markets allow the identification of the extent of discrimination through price or wage differences. That's not really close to Harford's (and many other commentators') characterization.

<>Given that Becker wrote in the 1950s, in the era of Jim Crow laws and systematic discrimination against African-Americans, it is more than slightly offensive to read an analysis of 20-second differences in waiting times in high-end coffee shops treated as a noteworthy social problem. This kind of stuff is Slate at its worst.

WHAT IN THE WORLD DOES NIGGARDLY MEAN? IF IT IS WAHT I THINK THAN THAT IS NOT A VERY NICE THING TO SAY. LOL ANYWAY YOU ARE RIGHT WOMEN DO GET TREATED LIKE SECOND RATE CITIZENS WHEN IT COMES TO SERVICE AT A CLUB. POSSIBLY MAKES UP FOR THE TIMES AT QUICK STOPS AND SUCH THAT THE DUDE BEHIND THE COUNTER ALWAYS TAKES THE LADY'S FIRST.

Could it be because some customers are better tippers? Also, I have worked in the service industry and Special Orders Do Upset Us. They slow down production, increase overall wait time, and result in frequent mistakes.

BTW, as mentioned by DBuss already, discrimination is a powerful word that denotes a deliberate action. A 20 second difference in wait times hardly denotes a deliberate action against a customer, even over a few hundred incidents. Every day I see statistics built to support a hypothesis. This appears to be the same.

-Sam

I am glad there are studies exploring how people treat each other, but the results of this study do not prove much of anything. Just like the time difference between black and whites or between attractive and unattractive people was deemed irrelevant by the people conducting this study, the time difference between men and women being served their coffee should be dismissed as well.

First, 20 seconds is a very short amount of time to wait, but it might be due to the fact that women have purses and have to dig around in them for their wallets and have to mess around with their purses for the change or receipts, which may cause a hold-up in processing their order. Maybe a woman also sat slightly farther away from the counter than a man did in some situations, which would account for the extra time taken for the server to walk the longer walk across the room to get the coffee to the woman. This could probably happen 50% of the time, and based on the speed of the server delivering the coffee varying from place to place, it could easily have pushed the service in favor of the men.

Whatever the reason, there are endless possibilities to explain the 20 second gap and if the study were done again, it may be be smaller or even reversed in women's favor based on the specific situation. It is unfair to jump in and base this small time difference solely on gender. I'd only be concerned if women were denied service completely or if the time gap was more like 20 minutes than 20 seconds.

Now, when more important and accurate studies showing the gender gap are shown, they will not be taken as seriously because studies like this one make the whole feminist cause look unnecessary.

Want better service? Tip above average and get your bartender's name.

It's not discrimination, it's people skills.

Umm.........I wonder which drink would take longer to make if a woman orders a typical " white-caramel frappacino skin milk not too much ice and just a right amount of whipping cream"........COMPARED to a typical man ordering a "small dark roast coffee with room for cream" which takes about 10 seconds to pour the coffee into the damn cup!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmmmm...............WHICH ONE MIGHT TAKE LONGER THAN THE OTHER?? OH BUT THAT JUST HAS TO BE DISCRIMINATION DOESN'T IT?? How dumb are these liberals who do write these blind articles and do these dumb surveys when obvious FACTORS can go into play????? And only 8 shops were surveyed? Eight? There's probably 8,000 coffee shops alone in some parts of NYC.

If there's one place in our society where women's needs are favored, it's a bar. Proof that everyone is quick to feel slighted and slow to recognize being favored.

Uh, Hayden, the article points out that the survey corrected for drink complexity.

At least now we know some people take 20 seconds less to read the article before critiquing its methodology and calling it liberal bias. :)

I am a woman who can impact a coffee shop's business by choosing to partonize or not, and telling my friends if I received good or equal service. If I get the feeling I have been discriminated against, or a man has received better service than myself, I'll not return. See how that will affect your bottom line when you sell fewer $4 fluffy coffees as opposed to those predictable "black" coffees!

The real issue here is lesbian tipping habits, even if the women at the coffee shops are all heterosexuals.

Lesbians have such a reputation as poor tippers that it negatively affects all women.

Exhibit A: Hillary!

No thats not true i have worked as a server/bartender for many years and can tell tou although lesbians do tip very low the sterotype of women being bad tippers come from middle aged women. At either end of the spectrum young women and then older women you get tipped very well. But for a majority of the time and i'm not saying all the time.....women hitting middle age seem to morph, And the tips decline to 15% and lower....and they become very demanding and picky. Also when it comes to coffee shops...coming from a few friends of mine that work in the industry. men tend to tip....women rarely do....so of course they are going to wait longer