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From education issues to gender misconceptions, we ask 'Why aren't there more women in tech?' and explore the possible reasons.

WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?

Women are under-represented in the tech sector. Not only that, but they're underpaid, often passed for promotions and faced with every day sexism. It's no wonder women are more likely to leave the industry within a year compared to their male counterparts

SO WHAT'S GOING ON?

To dissect the problem, we need to look at early development. At the high school, girls achieve better grades than boys. Yet for females who do pursue computer science at university level, they find themselves being outnumbered by males " 82% versus 17% " one of the highest gender disparities in course subjects. And this imbalance isn't helped by the falling trend of females taking up science, maths and computing courses.

A possible reason for why more girls don't pursue maths and science related degrees is due to the 'pinkification' of girls in early age. Toys, clothes and job possibilities are still marketed towards either gender, despite recent developments in breaking this historic trend.

This lack of women taking up tech-related degrees translates into the workforce, where at many tech companies, males form the overwhelming majority. This leads to women experiencing sexism and feeling like they don't belong. According to a survey by The Guardian, 73% of workers in the tech industry believe the industry is sexist. With news stories of sexism rife in the industry, it's clear there is a work culture problem of 'brogrammers' that needs addressing.

With more women leaving the industry, it makes having role models at the top increasingly difficult. This further adds to the image of a male-dominated tech world and adds to the cycle of female discouragement. As Linda Davis, CEO of Next Generation Recruitment points out, having key women in senior leadership roles will positively encourage other females to join an organization that is supportive of advancing women's careers, thus increasing overall company growth and productivity.

But besides sexism, role models and stereotypes, the industry makes it difficult to combine having a tech career with motherhood. In a recent study reported in Fortune, 85% of 716 women surveyed who have left the tech industry cite maternity leave policy as a major factor in their decision to leave. Tech employers who aren't supportive of their female staff and don't offer flexibility in working can only further discourage females from joining up.

This all has real-world consequences for the future of society and technology. How can devices and programs be built for everyone, if not everyone is involved in its production? Women make up half the world, so it's only logical they make up half the workforce.

It's time we focus on the next generation of tech talent and make sure gender equality exists for the good of everyone. This means more flexible working arrangements, more women in leadership roles and more encouragement at an early age for girls and boys to pursue whatever they are naturally interested in.

It's an uphill battle, but the world needs it.

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From education issues to gender misconceptions, we ask 'Why aren't there more women in tech?' and explore the possible reasons. Women are under-represented in the tech sector. Not only that, but they're underpaid, often passed for promotions and faced with every day sexism.

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Improving Gender Diversity in Technology by Encouraging Women in Tech Roles

The information technology sector has made tremendous leaps and bounds over the years. The industry is continuously moving towards an innovative future with the help of a creative workforce and advanced technologies. Undeniably, the workforce plays a fundamental role behind the success of a business, driving the world of advancement and innovation. The workforce that shares mutual understanding and efforts to a company's growth involves both men and women. Unfortunately, the number of women in technology and IT-related occupations has paled.

Increasing the number and role of women in tech has been a relentless effort for decades. However, women in the technology sector remain underrepresented, largely dominated by men. In the last couple of years, the proportion of women working in technology teams has risen only fractionally, from 21% to 22%, while the percentage of female technology leaders remains at just 12%. To improve the numbers, companies need to focus on where the real problem is. They need to attract female candidates for technology roles in the first place.

When it comes to equal pay, there is also a major gap between genders. This pay disparity raises numerous problems on many levels. Lack of transparency is one of the biggest impediments to accomplishing pay equality. To curb the issues around pay inequality and gender disparity, some countries in the world now have introduced regulations. In the United States, for instance, the state of California has enforced a law that requires public companies to have a woman on their board. On the other side, the UK has made it essential for companies employing more than 250 people to publicly disclose the salaries of their male and female staff members, raising greater transparency around gender pay gaps and inequality.

Creating Opportunities to Bolster Gender Diversity

Building a gender diverse workforce significantly leads to more dynamic work culture and increased creativity. However, making this scenario better requires much effort from companies and business leaders. They must create opportunities within their organizations that not only attract a gender-diverse workforce, but also retain a broad spectrum of employees.

Hiring people based on who is best for the role, companies can help enable hiring teams to think out of the box and congregate diverse candidates. Forward-thinking organizations and smart leaders always stay ahead of capitalizing on opportunities to benefit their companies by attracting, building and retaining a diverse workforce. They understand that creating and maintaining a welcoming and inclusive culture will fulfill their businesses' requirements.

For instance, Salesforce is one of the companies addressing the gap around gender diversity in several innovative ways. At Salesforce, women currently share 31.6 percent of the company's workforce, which is up from 30.9 percent last year. The company also increased the number of women in leadership positions by 28.3 percent during the same period. Besides this, Salesforce has conducted four global equal pay assessments to ensure equal pay for equal work.

In order to foster gender diversity, the company has a number of programs in place, including the Salesforce Women's Network, an enviable 26 weeks of paid parental leave, formal allyship and mentoring, and a focus on metrics, such as making diversity data available to the executive team on a monthly basis that can enable them to monitor outcomes and keep diversity goals on top.

Driving Effective Change Management

A majority of organizations today realize that making diversity and inclusion is a business imperative which can help them keep away from disgracing their reputation. Companies with diverse teams and effective diversity and inclusion initiatives can outperform those with a more homogeneous workforce. Even, reports show that greater diversity in the workforce will result in greater productivity and value creation. This improved diversity will also help drive better financial performance.

There are plenty of programmes, even at academic levels, improving gender diversity in the tech workforce. For example, InnovateHer, an educational programme in the UK, is working on minimizing the gender imbalance in technology by assisting girls aged 12 to 16 to learn the skills needed to pursue a career in tech. The programme encourages girls to take STEM subjects at GCSE and A level, increasing the number of women in STEM and challenging the status quo.

Comprehensively, as the information technology industry is growing at a significant pace, it has become essential to have women on board to meet the needs of society equally.

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Improving Gender Diversity in Technology by Encouraging Women in Tech Roles | Analytics Insight

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Improving Gender Diversity in Technology by Encouraging Women in Tech Roles The information technology sector has made tremendous leaps and bounds over the years. The industry is continuously moving towards an innovative future with the help of a creative workforce and advanced technologies.

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One company that has come a long way, and can show us all how to make change-in a short amount of time-is Redfin, a real estate technology company based in Seattle. When Bridget Frey joined the team in 2011, she was one of just a handful of female engineers. She was later promoted to chief technology officer, and within a matter of years, women represented one in three of Redfin's hundreds of engineers. "The idea that diversity takes time or it's a tough nut to crack has been belied by our own experience," Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman told me.

To get women in the door, Frey took the lead on rebuilding the infrastructure to better attract and serve female engineers, and Kelman would then close the deal. For a while, he personally spoke to every single female candidate. "Bridget, before she focused on how much code she was going to ship, she focused on building a system of fairness," Kelman says, explaining how she began by broadening their recruiting efforts. Redfin sought out women with nontraditional backgrounds for engineering jobs, and even pulled some candidates from their marketing team, teaching them the necessary technical skills in-house. They collected data on whether these unlikely recruits could perform just as well as a typical Stanford-educated computer science graduate. "Lo and behold, they are getting promoted at the same rate as people coming out of those four-year programs. I realized, clearly you can teach people how to code," Frey said. Redfin executives didn't complain about the "pipeline" of talent; they created their own.

And there was a business payoff too. Redfin had been trying to automate tour scheduling for their real estate agents for many years, to no avail. The goal was to allow potential home buyers to book a tour with a Redfin agent in just a few clicks. But adoption was low. "Our agents are 60 percent female, and many of them don't have a college education . . . and we kept ignoring their problems," Kelman explains. Once the engineering team hired more women, the more gender-diverse group took a completely different approach and decided to visit and speak to agents on the ground before they developed more software. When they reworked the product, adoption tripled, increasing traffic to Redfin agents. "There was more empathy, there was more diversity, and when we solved that problem, we generated an extra 30 million dollars in revenue over 18 months," Kelman says.

Redfin has also focused on keeping all employees engaged in an ongoing conversation about why such efforts are important. Often building a more diverse team means more voices, more disagreements, and more potential conflict. "It's a good thing to have conflict to move things forward, but you have to teach people how to deal with it," Frey says. You also have to be open to making mistakes, and remember that the best practices to create inclusive workplaces are still evolving. "Talking about diversity is about feeling uncomfortable," Frey adds. "Male allies need to participate in some of the discussions. And you need to accept that sometimes it's going to feel awkward." To avoid a James Damore-type scandal, it's essential to keep workers educated about the purpose of various initiatives, to have the data to justify them, and to talk openly about how it's going along the way.

Sometimes, that data would be more easily ignored. In 2015, Salesforce undertook a companywide audit to determine if male and female employees in similar jobs were being paid equally. After a painstaking, yearlong review, the company boosted the salaries of 6% of its workforce, spending a total of $3 million to eliminate unexplained differences in pay. Salesforce repeated the audit the following year after acquiring several companies, and examined not just gender but also race, and found the gap had crept back. Salesforce spent another $3 million to level up salaries and close it. A year and another assessment later, it cost an additional $2.7 million to get back to parity.

"It's a huge amount of work to pay attention globally," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told me, reiterating his vow to reexamine the pay gap every year. "Every CEO needs to be focused on equality . . . Every CEO needs to realize they can make these changes. They can evolve. They can go forward. They can inspire others."
Excerpted from BROTOPIA: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Emily Chang, 2019.

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How Redfin is breaking up the boys' club of Silicon Valley

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One company that has come a long way, and can show us all how to make change-in a short amount of time-is Redfin, a real estate technology company based in Seattle. When Bridget Frey joined the team in 2011, she was one of just a handful of female engineers.

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When Joy Buolamwini was a student at MIT, she created a facial recognition robot, but she had to wear a white mask for the robot to detect her face. After conducting thorough research on the data set, she realized that most facial recognition platforms did not recognize the faces of women of color and that women were marginalized in the data set. The data was built by a team of just men and the issue could have been eliminated if they had the representation of women on the team. (https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/joy-buolamwini-examining-racial-and-gender-bias-in-facial-analysis-software-barbican-centre/LgKCaNKAVWQPJg?hl=en)

But, only 20% of computer scientists are women. Although numerous initiatives have been created to encourage more young women into the technology industry, the number of women in these fields continues to decrease due to several factors such as the gender pay gap and a lack of equality of treatment, which has lowered the self-esteem level and pushed them to leave the field. However, research by Daniel Kahneman, an expert on behavioral economics, indicates that after a certain point, more money does not necessarily yield more happiness, so why should society be concerned with closing the wage gap? It promotes the belief that women are not equal to their male counterparts, which severely impacts their confidence and self-esteem levels.  It obstructs the belief of gender equality. However, Nonprofits play a small role in resolving this issue for future generations as their impact has been shown to be minimal. They are unable to reach the number of girls necessary to create a large impact through their events and mentorship programs. But, companies can control the way women are treated in the workforce by ensuring equal treatment of all employees through policies, closing the gender pay gap, cultural initiatives, mentorship circles, and other tools. (https://hbr.org/2020/01/5-strategies-for-creating-an-inclusive-workplace) These techniques would not cost the employers any money as they would be run by existing employees. Non-profits shouldn’t be responsible for resolving these issues like the environment at these companies is what is causing women to leave the workforce in the first place.

The gender pay gap that currently exists has also hindered women from entering the workforce. According to CNBC, the gender wage gap currently exists due to the devaluation of the work that women do couple with the overwhelming amount of men in leadership positions. First, it furthers the falsehood that women are not equal to their male counterparts. It also ruins any feeling of inclusivity and support that the women might have gained from a mentorship program. Third, the gender wage gap affects bonuses and inhibits them from receiving promotions, since the culture has wired some men in leadership positions to believe that women are less deserving of financial rewards, such as bonuses. Fourth, it forces women to leave the field, something unconscionable yet commonplace in 21st century America. It is clear that there are several ways that companies and nonprofits can make all employees, not just women, feel included and valued in their work environment. But there are a few limitations of these efforts, namely the minimal impact of nonprofits on the U.S. corporate world as a whole. Closing the gender pay gap sends the message to both employees and consumers that women are equal in value and skill when they have the same roles as meN (www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/2018/04/04/by-the-numbers-what-pay-inequality-looks-like-for-women-in-tech/#9f33fac60b11.)

Diversity is certainly a huge asset in the workforce as it can cultivate incredible ideas. Salesforce, a multi-billion dollar software company, states that on their site that “Diversity and inclusivity in the workplace are necessary to create a competitive economy in a globalized world.” Corporate America will also benefit financially from having an inclusive and diverse work environment. Moreover, closing the gender pay gap will help to eliminate the issues that women face today in corporate America. It conveys that women are equal to their male counterparts.

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As a graduate student, Joy found an AI system detected her better when she was wearing a white mask, prompting her research project Gender Shades. This project uncovered the bias built in to commercial AI in gender classification showing that facial analysis technology AI has a heavy bias towards white males.

"I am a poet of code on a mission to show compassion through computation. I lead the Algorithmic Justice League, an organisation that uses art and research to highlight the social implications of artificial intelligence. In my practice, I have learned the importance of allowing intuition and play to guide my explorations. I now make artistic expressions informed by our algorithmic bias research to interrogate the limitations of AI, but my journey into studying the social impact of AI started because of my intimate frustrations with creating an art project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

During my first year at the MIT Media Lab, I took a course called 'Science Fabrication'. The premise of the course was to read science fiction and use it as inspiration to manifest a project that might otherwise be considered too impractical or fanciful. As part of the class we had futurist Stuart Candy conduct a workshop called 'The Thing from the Future'. Participants drew cards that provided the constraints for an imagined future object."

Using the parameters framed by my cards (object-artwork | arc-half a decade from now | mood optimist) I sketched the Hall of Possibilities - a future space with paintings that you could walk into and there become another being. Gazing upon a painting would enable you to become a part of what you viewed. The next challenge was to take this imagined future and create a real-world object. While I couldn't create paintings that people could walk into, I realised I could use a half-silvered mirror and an LCD screen to create a magical effect. By placing the special glass on a computer screen, I could change the reflection of the onlooker.

As I played with the effect, I created an object called the Aspire Mirror in 2015. The development of the Aspire Mirror was influenced by emotional devices like the empathy box and mood organ in Philip K. Dick's science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) as well as Anansi the spider, a legendary creature spoken about in Ghanaian tales about shape shifting. Perhaps by seeing ourselves as another, by shifting the shape of our reflections, we could engender more empathy. Staring into the Aspire Mirror, an onlooker could see reflected onto her face animals, quotes, symbols, or anything else we could code into the system.

Once I achieved the effect, I added a web camera with computer vision software. The software used AI-enabled facial analysis technology to track a face so that the animals or quotes would follow the reflection of the onlooker. At least that was the idea, but as I worked to build the Aspire Mirror, I noticed that the software had a hard time following my face consistently. One night after returning from a party with a Halloween mask, I started working on the mirror. As a last resort to get the project to work, I put on the white mask. In the mirror, I became a lion."

"I took the mask off and was no longer detected. I had my lighter-skinned colleagues try out the mirror and it worked almost instantaneously for their faces. When the time came to demo this art project, I played it safe and used a volunteer with lighter skin.

Still, the experience of coding in a white mask continued to haunt me. I took another sequence of MIT Media Lab courses including 'Toys to Think With and Learning Creative Learning'. As part of that sequence I joined a team to create the UpBeat Walls project where we explored the question, 'What if you could paint walls with your smile?'

Using the same computer vision software and repurposing the code from the Aspire Mirror project, I programmed a system that would track the movement of a face, turning it into a digital paint brush and project-ing a trail of smiley faces onto a projection surface.

However, the UpBeat Walls project had the same issue as Aspire Mirror: while lighter-skinned individuals had no problem painting walls with their face movements, darker-skinned individuals struggled. The experience was frustrating but the issues with the technology did not seem urgent to me until I read the 2016 Perpetual Line Up report released by Georgetown Law. The report showed that over 1 in 2 adults in the US (more than 117 million people) currently had their face in facial recognition networks that could be searched by law enforcement using systems that had not been audited for accuracy.

In the UK a subsequent report revealed that facial analysis systems used by law enforcement agencies had false positive match rates of over 90%. There, false matches had misidentified more than 2000 innocent people as criminals.

When I learned about the increased use of facial analysis systems in law enforcement and thought about my personal issues with the technology, I decided to share my story. In a 2016 TED talk, I spoke about how I coded in white mask to have my face detected, and how the technology failed. Facial analysis technology, like many data-driven AI systems, is fundamentally based on pattern recognition. To teach a computer to detect a face, we use machine learning techniques that analyse large datasets of human faces. Over time, a ma¬chine learning model can be trained to detect a human face. However, if the faces in the dataset are not diverse, the model will struggle when presented with unfamiliar ones. In my case, a white mask was a closer fit to what the system had learned was a face than my actual human face."

"After sharing my story, I thought someone might want to check my claims, and so I decided to run facial analysis systems from different tech companies on my TED profile image. As I carried out these analyses, I found most of the systems did not detect my face, and the ones that did labelled me male.

Knowing that the techniques used for facial analysis are also used for pedestrian tracking, I wondered what would happen if self-driving cars couldn't detect people of colour? Furthermore, I learned that companies like HireVue use facial analysis technology to inform hiring decisions. What if the system was unfamiliar with faces like mine and prevented qualified persons from gaining employment? In fact, Amazon scrapped an internal AI hiring tool that displayed gender bias. The tool was trained on ten years of hiring data and categorically gave a low rank to any application that included the term 'women' or listed certain women-only colleges. The AI picked up something I call the 'coded gaze' - a reflection of the preferences, priorities, and at times prejudices of those who have the power to shape technology. In the case of AI sorting through job applications, finding the words that lead to discrimination is fairly straightforward. However, when AI is analysing faces, it can be much harder to determine which attributes could lead to harmful discrimination.

When I started looking at face datasets used in the development of facial analysis technology, I found that in some cases they contained 75% male faces and over 80% lighter faces. For these systems, data is destiny, and if the data is largely pale and male, AI trained on skewed data is destined to fail the rest of society - the undersampled majority - women and people of colour.

I decided to focus my MIT thesis on studying facial analysis technology. I launched a project called Gender Shades where I tested commercially sold AI systems from IBM, Microsoft, and Face++, a billion-dollar tech company in China with access to one of the largest datasets of Chinese faces. Since existing datasets tended to be dominated by pale-skinned and male faces, I created my own dataset called the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark which was better balanced on gender and skin type. I ran the AI systems from each company on 1270 faces from the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark dataset.

For the task of guessing the gender of a face, the results were stunning. For lighter-skinned males, error rates were no more than 1%, and for lighter-skinned females they were no more than 7%. For darker skinned males, the error rates went up to 12% and for darker skinned females error rates were as high at 37% in aggregate. When we disaggregated the error rates by skin type we found that for the darkest-skinned women error rates were as high as 47%. All companies had reduced gender to a binary meaning that by just guessing, the AI system had a 50/50 chance of getting the correct answer by chance.

I shared the results with the companies and more than 230 articles in over 35 countries were published about the findings. Since the publication of the research, all the companies have made significant improvements. However, even if facial analysis technology is made more accurate, it can still be weaponized and placed on lethal autonomous weapons; it can be used by law enforcement for racial profiling; and governments can employ the technology covertly for mass surveillance. Since this technology is highly susceptible to bias and abuse, I have worked with companies and civil liberties organisations to launch the Safe Face Pledge.

The Safe Face Pledge is an opportunity for organisations to make public commitments towards mitigating the abuse of facial analysis technology. This historic pledge prohibits lethal use of the technology, lawless police use, and requires transparency in any government use. The Safe Face Pledge provides actionable and measurable steps that organisations can take to ensure they are following AI ethics principles. The pledge is a reminder that we have choice. Whether AI will help us reach our aspirations or reinforce the unjust inequalities is ultimately up to us."

Joy Buolamwini is a computer scientist and digital activist based at the MIT Media Lab. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League, an organisation that looks to challenge bias in decision making software.

Essay originally published in the AI: More than Human exhibition catalogue as 'Facing the Coded Gaze' by Joy Buolamwini.

AI: More Than Human is a major exhibition exploring creative and scientific developments in AI, demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. The exhibition takes place at the Barbican Centre, London from 16 May-26 Aug 2019.

The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.

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Joy Buolamwini: examining racial and gender bias in facial analysis software - Barbican Centre - Google Arts & Culture

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As a graduate student, Joy found an AI system detected her better when she was wearing a white mask, prompting her research project Gender Shades. This project uncovered the bias built in to commercial AI in gender classification showing that facial analysis technology AI has a heavy bias towards white males.

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Through reading this novel, I reflected on how we tend to rely on instant gratification and are constantly finding ways to gain contentment. This book has caused me to have several revelations about the way I am living my life and the lens I view the world through. The author’s vivid imagery helps you comprehend the life of Pearl, an employee for Apricity, a company that provides contentment plans for residents. If you are fascinated by the potential of our future, I highly suggest reading this book as you will ponder about the possibilities that the future holds. This novel will make you to re-think and evolve your mindset about mental health along with the future regarding happiness. Through this class and reading the novel, I have expanded my knowledge on what it means to be content and how it truly comes from within. There are certain steps you can take that are presented here, but you need to find ways to be content

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Figuring out where you should live can be difficult. If your options include a city, rural area or suburb, it's a good idea to weigh the advantages and disadvantages specific to your family and each living environment. Factors like real estate taxes, property size, property value, schools and space can help you compare the unique benefits of living in the suburbs over living downtown or in the country.

We've already highlighted the benefits of big-city living. If you are having trouble deciding, check out some of the great aspects of living between an urban center and a rural area.
1. Bigger Houses & More Space
Compared to an inner-city living situation, you will usually find more square footage for your money in the suburbs. Tracts of land often include room for a home, as well as front, back and even side yards. Many suburbs were evolved from previously rural or wooded areas, so your property may have trees and wildlife. Having more space inside and out is one of the most common reasons previous city dwellers move into the suburbs.

While you get the benefit of space, suburbs are usually still close enough to commute into the city. Since cities usually provide a wide variety of jobs, this proximity to income opportunities can give the suburbs an edge over rural areas.
2. Better Education
Suburban areas typically offer better schools than urban or rural districts. If you have or plan to have children in the near future, it's a good idea to consider the importance of education in your lifestyle. Even if you do not plan to have kids, knowing the state of the school district can be helpful come resale time. However, in many suburbs you will pay higher property taxes for those better-quality schools. There are some places where you can get a bargain - better value for the property taxes you pay.
3. Neighbors & Nature
Whether it is local parks or close-knit neighborhoods, residents of the suburbs often enjoy fresh air, natural scenery and a strong sense of community. People often move to suburbia specifically to raise children, escape the hustle and bustle, and improve life and safety for their families.
4. Quality of Life
Suburbia offers an escape from the work and stresses of the big city, while still allowing relative proximity to other people and necessities. With less traffic congestion and crowding, as well as a lower crime rate, suburbanites often find a higher quality of life than what is available elsewhere. There is access to plentiful job opportunities while having the option for recreational and outdoor activities as well as opportunities to meet people and join a community.

If you get easily bored or like the options afforded in a city, suburbia may not be for you. Being far away from the action of city life or without the rolling property in the country may sound unappealing. Outings in the suburbs take time and effort and the commute to work in the city may be long and expensive. You may also need the use of a car, which adds insurance, gas and upkeep costs. It's important to consider your priorities when you determine which type of location you want to call home.

No matter where you land, it's always important to check your credit before getting a mortgage, since a bad credit score can cost you tens of thousands of dollars over the life of a loan. You can check two of your credit scores for free every month on Credit.com.

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Figuring out where you should live can be difficult. If your options include a city, rural area or suburb, it's a good idea to weigh the advantages and disadvantages specific to your family and each living environment.

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green sign with a horse-drawn carriage marks the turn in the road: Townes at Covington, it reads, a nod to the management company running properties in this quiet cul-de-sac 30 minutes outside Washington DC.

Of course, there aren't any horse-drawn carriages here. There aren't even really any pedestrians. I drive up to a cheerful cream-colored house with blue shutters. I park.

It's high summer in the Washington metro area - the Fourth of July - and neither I nor the couple I've come to interview seem to mind meeting on the holiday. There is, after all, a reason they left the District and bought a big airy townhouse in Bowie, Maryland, last year. The last place any of us want to be in the 90F (32C) heat is barbequing on a concrete city roof.

Charla Freeland, 27, and Brian Freeland, 32, are graduates of Howard University in Washington, and both still work in the city for the radio station Sirius XM. But they came here to escape DC's soaring real estate prices and the stresses of city life. As Brian puts it when we're seated in the living room: "I like my space."

Here there's plenty of space: parking for their two cars, a deck overlooking a leafy park, a reservoir with birds nearby, and a room upstairs where, Charla says, "we keep our shoes".

We're inheriting this highly toxic system that only favors rich people. Cities are becoming unaffordable

Patrick Sterns, 35

All that for less than the price of a one-bedroom condo in Washington. That's not lost on Brian, whose view of the homeownership is, like other members of the millennial generation, still shaped by the 2008 housing crash and ensuing Great Recession.

At its sale price of $289,000, their three-storey townhouse cost around a quarter of what it would in their old stomping grounds of Shaw - a historically black neighborhood where median home prices have more than quintupled since 1995, making it one of DC's fastest-appreciating real estate markets in recent years.

They haven't made new friends yet and Charla misses her old ones in the city, whom she now drives half an hour just to meet for brunch. She doesn't expect to be doing it long.

Most of her friends are still single and they give her no grief for leaving. "I was lucky," she says of meeting Brian as an undergrad. "When they find someone, they'll be out in the suburbs too."

Suburban life may be once again in ascendance, as millennials, pushed away from exorbitant city prices and finally able to afford their first houses, are rediscovering suburbs' spacious charms.

Brian and Charla Freeland stand inside their kitchen. Photograph: Jocelyn Augustino/The Guardian

While there's no official data on the number of millennials moving away from cities, the recent census suggests some suburban revival is afoot, driven by millennials.

"Population change gives you a crude sense of flow," says William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a demographer who has studied city migration patterns for decades, when I meet him at his downtown office. "Smaller cities are growing and large cities are not growing as fast."

Flipping open his 2018 report on the millennial cohort, Frey runs a finger over the chart showing age distribution in the United States, pointing to the bulge in population that tells him millennials are largely responsible for the suburban trend.

If such patterns continue, he argues, they could upend the 2010s stereotype of millennials all wanting to live in a Brooklyn-like urban jungle.

Frey has called the period from 2010 to 2020 " the decade of the city ". And, while the city's reign doesn't seem to be lasting as long as he predicted, in a sense he was right: the city's rule will be temporary, not an unstoppable drive toward urbanization.

I want to know what's driving young people in and out of cities, and the answer seems to be politics, gentrification and the economy, not vague notions of city "coolness" or "millennial personality" traits.

Sure, millennials like aspects of city living, Frey says. But the shift to cities came three years after the housing market crash and recession. He doesn't think that's a coincidence - larger economic forces are afoot.

"The youngest millennials have more options economically while the oldest millennials are starting to think about what their next stage of life looks like and making decisions that look more similar to what we'd expect that age group to do," Jeannette Chapman, the deputy director of the Stephen S Fuller Institute, tells me later in a phone call. "They're growing up."

***

Patrick Sterns, 35, formerly of Oakland, California, recently came to the realization he couldn't buy a house where he grew up.

Not long ago, much of downtown Oakland was still considered an affordable alternative to San Francisco, home to the country's priciest real estate. The Oakland hills of Patrick's youth have always been desirable, but now the soaring cost of housing has become prohibitive there, too.

"On the one hand it's thriving, on the other hand it's really expensive," Patrick says.

The problem is that a home is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and for Patrick - who works in the clean energy sector, like his 34-year-old MBA graduate wife, Martha Serianz - there is always someone in Oakland with deeper pockets.

Patrick Sterns and Martha Serianz at home outside of Oakland. Photograph: Supplied

That's how they ended up half an hour's drive north of the city in a neighborhood that's technically Richmond but functionally, they say, El Sobrante. And how in the spring of 2016 they bought the 1,300 sq-ft of house they dreamed of having as mid-30s professionals: three beds, two baths and on a corner lot. The list price was $435,000.

"If we could have afforded Temescal and being in the hip area where a lot of our friends are, it would have been nice," Martha says.

But walking to cool bars in trendy neighborhoods, she adds, wasn't really an option. "We'd have to double the cost of our mortgage," she explains.

"It used to be you get a high school degree and you can get a good job with a union," Patrick says. "Now the right is dismantling unions, you get a tertiary degree and you still can't get a job."

He adds: "We're inheriting this highly toxic system that really only favors rich people. Cities are becoming unaffordable and, at the same time, there's no solution on the table to help with housing.

"If we're bitter," he says of millennials, "it's because we have to live somewhere."

Martha adds: "We're saddled with so many financial responsibilities. 'Buy a house' - but you have thousands of dollars of student loan debts! Or 'find a great job' - but older people with more experience will get it!"

Combined with the high costs of childcare, and the difficulty of saving for retirement, the situation becomes crippling. "City living was supposed to be the future," she says. "It certainly isn't anymore."

***

Suburbs offering traditionally urban attributes appear to be on the rise.

"A lot of suburban areas are thinking about how they can be more city-like," says Steven Pedigo, a professor at New York University who directs the Urban Lab at the school's Schack Institute of Real Estate. Similarly, cities, as they lose young people, will be looking at suburban amenities they can provide.

Such closer-in, cluster-style suburbs have already arrived in many places. And Pedigo - who chose his town of residence for its diversity, good coffee shops, transit and walkability - would know because he lives in one.

"My students always say: 'You're a city guy who lives in the suburbs!?'" Pedigo says.

Where things are headed, with many suburbs ranking high in walkability and other public amenities once considered the province of cities, he doesn't think it is a contradiction in terms.

"Anything above a certain walk score, we didn't even consider," he says, of moving to South Orange, New Jersey, with his husband.

The oldest millennials are starting to think about what their next stage of life looks like

Jeannette Chapman, Stephen S Fuller Institute

It's a world apart from more traditional tract-housing-style suburbs (where the buildings are nearly identical), or places where public transit may be non-existent but you can get a lot more house.

"It's the tale of two suburbs," Pedigo says. He expects to see more millennials weighing these factors as they make their exodus from cities - a practical calculation that, as a suburb-loving urbanist, he admires.

"What's interesting ... is millennials are, more than anyone else, able to make true 'place decisions'."

It used to be that people moved one of two places: where they could get a job or where their family lived. Instead, he says, millennials ask: which place can provide me with the best quality of life?

If most of us were any good at predicting what will make us happy or provide the best quality of life, self-help wouldn't be the booming industry it is today. But a recent paper published in the journal Regional Studies may offer guidance.

Beyond showing millennials are happiest in cities, the study found that millennials were least happy in rural areas, and, specifically, that they suffered most from isolation, in contrast to older generations who preferred the quiet.

Some anecdotal evidence bears that out. Another Oakland couple I spoke to had moved an hour and a half north of the Bay Area to pursue a rural homesteading dream in Forestville only to move back five years later with the hard-earned self-knowledge that they are city people after all.

They have plenty of company in that. "Not only are millennials the exception, they're the exact opposite of other generations," says the co-author Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn of his paper's finding on young people and rural isolation.

But there is a spectrum of urban-to-rural living, and plenty of options for millennials who want a country lifestyle without the sense of isolation.

***

Scott Beauchamp and his wife Nika had been living in Brooklyn, New York, when they decided to take a road trip to find their future home.

They'd been living in New York for years, but couldn't afford to buy there. "Other people seemed emotionally invested in living in Brooklyn or being a New Yorker," he says, but he and Nika never really were.

Scott and Nika Beauchamp. Photograph: Handout

Her mom had a house on a lake in New Hampshire where they went to stay in the summer of 2014. After that they spent some time driving around New England, and fell in love with coastal Maine.

Beauchamp, a freelance writer, grew up in what he calls "postwar strip-mall suburbia" in St Louis, Missouri. And the experience was enough to tell him he didn't want more of that. He also knew he didn't want to forgo community.

He and his wife were charmed by Portland, Maine, and lived there for a year, but ultimately they wanted to move somewhere where they were getting a better deal.

"We knew we wanted to stay on the coast," he says, adding "we like being by the ocean." So they kept shrinking their budget and traveling north, trying to get more for less money.

My wife now that she has a taste, she's hungry for the country life and wants to move even further out

Scott Beauchamp, 34

They found the house they'd buy in the shipbuilding town of Bath. It was 1,400 sq ft with four bedrooms - for $180,000. The town has several "very cool" bookstores, Scott says, a walkable downtown, a beautiful waterfront, an outdoor farmers market, and an endless string of trails.

They've lived there since March of 2016, and for Scott, 34, and Nika, 31, it's been a pretty perfect fit.

"My wife has gotten into native plants, repopulating our yard with them," Scott says, adding that she has a mind to someday buy a plot of land and have a completely environmentally sound homestead.

He doesn't plan to move anytime soon, but it's still a bit unclear whether the existential search for home is over.

"Living closer to nature has made us more conscious of our relationship to it and its importance to us," he explains. "I foresee us living in this house another decade and then probably moving. My wife now that she has a taste, she's hungry for the country life and wants to move even further out."

***

Back in Bowie, Brian and Charla are perfectly content with their place, and they've taken pride in showing it off to me. But like Scott and Nika - and a lot of millennials, it seems - they've never stopped looking for a house.

The whole time I'm interviewing them, the TV is on and though it's set to silent, sometimes their eyes will flicker up. They're watching The Deed, a show about flipping houses in New Orleans and Chicago. Charla's hometown is New Orleans, and the place where her two sisters and nearly everyone in her family still lives.

She was living there during Hurricane Katrina and tells me early in the interview about how the builders who came in afterward overdid things, erecting million-dollar houses in places that will likely flood again.

The house being flipped, Charla tells me, part excitement in her voice, part horror, is just 15 minutes from her parents' place. It's going for $1.23m - six times what her parents' house is valued.

Would they move back there?

I think I know Charla's answer, but it's Brian who doesn't hesitate. "In a heartbeat," he says.

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Welcome to suburbia: the millennials done with city life - and city prices

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green sign with a horse-drawn carriage marks the turn in the road: Townes at Covington, it reads, a nod to the management company running properties in this quiet cul-de-sac 30 minutes outside Washington DC. Of course, there aren't any horse-drawn carriages here. There aren't even really any pedestrians.

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The suburbs - not quite urban and not quite rural - allow many of the conveniences of big city living, but typically with more space to move around, although not as much space as the country. There are plenty of advantages of living in the suburbs, but even so, suburban living is not for everyone. Find out whether you fit the bill of being a suburbanite.

Tip

Age may dictate whether you live in the city or the suburbs. Families with children opt for the recreational-abundant life in the suburbs while retirees like the convenience of public transportation and cultural activities that the city offers.

Look at Affordability

It's expensive to live in the city. On average, nationally as of 2017, the median price for a home in the city is $431,000, compared with $230,000 in the suburbs. In San Francisco, the median price of a city home is $1.6 million, but in Walnut Creek, a suburb about 30 miles from San Francisco, the median price for a home is $891,300. If you have a budget of, say, $250,000, you might find a home in the city, but it might not be big enough for your needs. Or you might only be able to afford a fixer-upper, and that will end up driving the price up again. The country might not be an option if it's nowhere near your job. But you should be able to find something nice in the suburbs.

You'll Get a Bigger Home

There's more land on which to build in the suburbs, so you will typically get a larger home in the suburbs than you would in the city. This is a huge advantage if there will be more than one or two of you living in the home. For families, the suburbs are generally the best option to get enough room to house everyone comfortably. You can probably get even more space, particularly outdoor space, in rural areas. But if you work in the city, the commute might be too great from a rural area, making the suburbs the only workable option.

Kids Have Better Schools

Public schools, overall, are better in the suburbs than in the inner cities. Graduation rates, for example are typically higher in the suburbs. Urban areas tend to have fewer resources and more disadvantaged students. Because this is general information, you should research your particular area to determine whether the school district is a good one. Look at school rankings, student-teacher ratios and test scores to help you decide.

You'll Have a Sense of Community

You can gain a sense of community in cities and in rural areas, but it's probably easiest to be part of a community in the suburbs. People often buy in the suburbs precisely to gain a sense of community to raise a family. You'll typically find neighborhood parks, nature trails and an escape from the hustle and bustle of the city there. Plus, when you buy a home in the suburbs, you often live in a neighborhood with a homeowner's association. There are typically activities associated with this, such as a community pool or clubhouse.

Enjoy a Quality of Life

When you live in a suburbs, you're close enough to get to the city for work and cultural events, but you can also enjoy shopping, restaurants, healthcare and emergency services right in your own community. If being in the middle of the action of a city or being surrounded by the farms or rolling hills of the country are what you desire most, you might find that the suburbs are too much of a compromise. But if you are looking for a taste of both worlds, the suburbs are probably for you.

You'll Pay More

Taxes in the suburbs usually cost less but groceries cost more. Transportation costs more. Healthcare costs more. Entertainment costs more. These are the bottom line factors when deciding where to live. But you can get more house and more living space if you opt for suburban living. It's a tradeoff that may benefit your growing family.

Photo Credits

George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images

About the Author

Laura is a landlord, journalist, and author of New Home Journal: Record All the Repairs, Upgrades and Home Improvements During Your Years at.... Her articles appear in various publications such as Trulia, Landlordology, The Motley Fool, Business Insider, AOL Real Estate, Forbes, The Penny Hoarder, and loanDepot.

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The Advantages of Living in the Suburbs. For many choosing whether to settle in a rural, urban or suburban environment is a difficult choice. The suburban lifestyle is not for everyone, but has its own unique advantages compared to living downtown or out in the country.

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Moving to the suburbs helps eliminate the feeling of a fast - paced life. As I have witnessed with my two parents, work tends to consume their lives on a daily basis. They never meant for it to, but they want to ensure that we have a roof over our heads and food on the table. However, since we moved into the suburbs, I have noticed a huge shift in our family dynamic. We go on daily walks after finishing up dinner, we enjoy the fresh air around us, and escape the grind in a way. According to a recent article published on Bloomberg, Scientists have proven that relocating to the suburbs helps families come together and feel more contentment in their lives in general. Specifically, researchers in the article analysis suburbs have larger homes for a lower cost, which alleviates some of the pressures that typically impact the homeowner. (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-09/why-new-yorkers-are-looking-to-the-suburbsSuburbs also offer more resources such as stronger schools, a stronger sense of community and belonging, and lower crime. These factors certainly appeal to families across the US, which makes the choice easy for families on where to reside. However,  living in suburbs poses issues as well such as extending commute times for those who have to travel into the cities for work. For example, my parents commute over two hours a week to travel to work. However, housing prices are lower in the suburbs rather than in major metropolitan cities. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/a-semi-feudal-society-in-east-palo-alto-the-influx-of-tech-companies-pushes-residents-to-a-breaking-point-over-gentrification/2018/11/02/03e1004c-d17c-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html) So, my parents decided to make some of their time sacrifice time to live in the suburbs to alleviate some of the costs that come with residing in the city. Those changes will heavily impact the development and infrastructure that exists in the town currently. Moreover, living in the suburbs will also help reduce gentrification to occur in major cities. Gentrification refers to the changes that a community goes through after higher class people move in. But, this process displaces several people of color in society. They are forced to pick up their items and leave their home towns as rent drastically soars due to the newly created demand. (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-to-save-the-middle-class/)
In San Francisco, the home to over a thousand companies, the city has seen a drastic increase in homelessness due to housing prices soaring. Gentrification has been occurring in our communities around the world for decades. It has been changing the lifestyle and culture that exists in those cities. Therefore, by residing in suburbs, you are helping by not exacerbating this prevalent issue that needs to be resolved. So, by residing in the suburbs, you are helping create a better lifestyle for yourself and your family as well as alleviating the disastrous problem of gentrification from rapidly occurring.

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Ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft are delivering pitiful levels of take-home pay to the hundreds of thousands of US independent contractors providing their own vehicles and driving skills to deliver the core service, according to an MIT CEEPR study examining the economics of the two app platforms.

The report catalyses the debate about conditions for workers on gig economy platforms, and raises serious questions about the wider societal impacts of tax avoiding, VC-funded tech giants.

The study, entitled The Economics of Ride-Hailing: Driver Revenue, Expenses and Taxes, and which was carried out by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, surveyed more than 1,100 Uber and Lyft ride-hailing drivers combined with detailed vehicle cost information - factoring in costs such as fuel, insurance, maintenance and repairs - to come up with a median profit per hour worked.

The upshot? The researchers found profit from ride-hail driving to be "very low". On an hourly basis, the median profit was $3.37 per hour, with 74% of drivers earning less than the minimum wage in the state where they operate.

They also found a median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving but incurs costs of $0.30 per mile; and almost a third (30 per cent) of drivers were found to incur expenses exceeding their revenue or to be losing money for every mile they drive.

The research also looked at how ride-hailing profits are taxed, and suggests that in the US a majority of driver profits are going untaxed owing to how mileage deduction is handled for tax purposes - suggesting Uber and Lyft's business are denuding the public purse too.

From the study:

On a monthly basis, mean profit is $661/month (median $310). Drivers are eligible to use a Standard Mileage Deduction for tax purposes ($0.54/mile in 2016) which far exceeds median costs per mile of $0.30/mile. Because of this deduction, most ridehailing drivers are able to declare profits that are substantially lower. Mean drivers who use a Standard Mileage Deduction would declare taxable profit of $175 rather than the $661 earned. These numbers suggest that approximately 74% of driver profit is untaxed.

The authors add that if their $661/month mean profit is representative then the US' Standard Mileage Deduction facilitates "several billion in untaxed income for hundreds of thousands of ride-hailing drivers nationwide".

So what does the study tell us about the ride-hailing business model? "It tells us that it's a shitty place to work," says Mark Tluszcz, co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners who has described the gig economy model as the modern day sweatshop, and says his VC firm made a conscious decision not to invest in gig economy companies because the model is exploitative.

"It tells you that it's a great place if you're a company. It's really a poor place to be an employee or be a worker."

The exploitative asymmetry of ride-hailing platforms comes because workers have a certain amount of fixed costs but the platform intermediary can just hike its commission at will and lower the service cost to the end user whenever it wants to increase competitiveness vs a rival business.

"At the end of the day there are a certain amount of fixed costs [for drivers]," says Tluszcz. "You have to buy a car, you have to get insurance, you have to pay for gas... And if you as an intermediary, which those platforms are, are taking an increasing amount of commission - 10%, 15%, now 20 in most of their markets - and then you're using the price of the trip as a way of beating your competitor... then you as a driver are sitting there with basically all of your fixed costs and your income is going down and frankly the only way to cover your costs is to spend more hours in the car.

"Which is frankly what's clearly illustrated by this study. These people have to spend so much time to cover their costs when you break it down to an hourly revenue, it's a pitiful amount. And by the way you have no social coverage because you've got to take care of that yourself."

At the time of writing neither Uber not Lyft had responded to a request for comment on the MIT study. But an Uber spokesperson told The Guardian the company believes the research methodology and findings are "deeply flawed", adding: "We've reached out to the paper's authors to share our concerns and suggest ways we might work together to refine their approach."

Tluszcz was quick to dispatch that critique. "MIT is not some second tier organization that did this study," he points out. "For me that's a reference moment when MIT says look, there's an issue here... There's something wrong in the model and we can tolerate it for a period of time but ultimately we're creating this lost generation of people."

"These business are built on situations in the market that are not realistic," he tells TechCrunch. "They took advantage of a hole in legislation... Governments let that happen. And it made all of sudden services cheaper. But people have to eat. People have to live. And ultimately there's only 100% of a cake.

"Cabbies in the UK are not millionaires; they make a decent living. But they make a decent living because there's a certain price-point to offer the service. And in every industry you have that. There is a certain fair price point to be able to live in that industry... And clearly right now, in the ride-sharing businesses, you don't have it."

In Europe, where Uber's business has faced a series of legal challenges, the company has begun offering some subsidized insurance products for platform workers - including one for Uber Eats couriers across Europe and a personal injury and insurance product for drivers in the UK.

In January in the UK it also announced a safety cap on the number of consecutive hours drivers on its platform can accept trips, after coming under rising political and legal pressure on safety and working conditions.

Last year Uber also lost its first appeal against an employment tribunal that judged a group of Uber drivers to be workers, not self-employed contractors as it had claimed - meaning they are entitled to workers rights such as holiday and sick pay.

Uber also had its license to operate in London withdrawn last fall, with the local transport regulator citing concerns about safety and corporate responsibility as key considerations for not renewing the company's private hire vehicle license.

Tluszcz's view is that such moves prefigure a more major shift incoming in Europe that could cement permanent roadblocks to business models that function via intentional worker exploitation.

"The flaw in the [gig economy] model as a worker is so big that it seems to be quite clear that European governments are going to be looking at this and saying this is just not the European ethos. It's just not," he argues. "There's going to be a moment when all these things are clashing. And I think it's a cultural clash that we have really, between European values of equity and American values of just pure market capitalism.

"You can't expect somebody making $3.37 an hour to take a part of that to contribute to retirement and social coverage. What the hell do you live on?" he adds.

"We're creating the next lost generation of people who simply don't have enough money to live and those companies are fundamentally enabling it under the premise that they're offering a cheaper service to consumers... And I just don't think Europe will put up with this."

Last month the UK government confirmed its intent to act on this area by announcing a package of labor market reforms intended to respond to changes driven by the rise of gig economy platforms. It dubbed the strategy a 'Good Work Plan' - billing it as an expansion of workers rights and saying "millions" more workers would get new day-one rights, coupled with a tighter enforcement regime on platforms and companies to ensure they are providing sick and holiday pay rights.

"We are proud to have record levels of employment in this country but we must also ensure that workers' rights are always upheld," said the UK prime minister, also emphasizing that her goal was to build "an economy that works for everyone".

It's likely to publish more detail on the employment law reform later this year. But the direction of travel for gig economy platforms in Europe looks clear: Away from being freely able to exploit legal loopholes and towards a much more tightly managed framework of employment and workforce welfare regulations to ensure that underlying support structures (such as the UK's national minimum wage) aren't just being circumvented by clever engineering and legal positioning.

"This for me is an inherent dilemma one has between capitalism and some level of socialism which we have in Europe," adds Tluszcz. "This is a clash of two fundamentally different views of the world and ultimately as a company you have to be a company that views your role in society as one of being a contributor - and tech companies can't hide behind the fact; they must do the same.

"And unfortunately all these ride-sharing businesses, and including most of these gig economy companies, are just trying to take advantage of holes and frankly I don't see them at all looking at their reason to be as at least having a component of 'I'm good for the society in which I operate'. They don't. They just simply don't care.

"That's a dilemma we have as consumers, because on the one hand we like the fact that it's cheap. But we wish that people could all have a decent living."

Whether US companies will be forced into a less exploitative relationship with their US workers remains to be seen.

Tluszcz's view is that it will need some kind of government intervention for these types of companies to rethink how their models operate and who they are impacting.

"Tech companies frankly have an equal amount of responsibility to be great corporate citizens. And right now it feels - particularly because many of these tech companies are born in the US - it almost feels like this Americanism about them says I don't have to be a good corporate citizen. I'm going to take advantage of the world for me and my shareholders," he says.

"I'm a capitalist but I do think there's some moral guidance you have to have about the business you're building. And the US tech companies, around the world - certainly in Europe - are being highly criticized ... Where is your moral compass? And unfortunately, today, sitting here, you have to say they lost it."

Update: A Lyft spokesperson has now emailed the following statement in response to our request for comment: "Drivers are an integral part of Lyft's success. An ever-growing number of individuals around the country are using Lyft as a flexible way to earn income, and we will continue to engage with our driver community to help them succeed. We have not yet reviewed this study in detail, but an initial review shows some questionable assumptions."

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MIT study shows how much driving for Uber or Lyft sucks

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Ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft are delivering pitiful levels of take-home pay to the hundreds of thousands of US independent contractors providing their own vehicles and driving skills to deliver the core service, according to an MIT CEEPR study examining the economics of the two app platforms. ...

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Here's the latest evidence that Uber and Lyft are destroying our world: Students at the University of California Los Angeles are taking an astonishing 11,000 app-based taxi trips every week that begin and end within the boundaries of the campus.

The report in the Daily Bruin revealed anew that Uber, Lyft, Via and the like are massively increasing car trips in many of the most walkable and transit friendly places in U.S.

It comes after a raft of recent studies have found negative effects from Uber and Lyft, such as increased congestion, higher traffic fatalities, huge declines in transit ridership and other negative impacts. It's becoming more and more clear that Uber and Lyft having some pretty pernicious effects on public health and the environment, especially in some of the country's largest cities.

We decided to compile it all into a comprehensive list, and well, you judge for yourself. Here we go:

They increase driving - a lot

The U.C.L.A. trips are an example of what is happening at a much wider scale: A lot more driving.

Uber and Lyft, for example, are providing 90,000 rides a day in Seattle now. That's more than are carried daily by the city's light rail system, the Seattle Times reports.

One study estimated that in cities with the highest Uber and Lyft adoption rates, driving has increased about 3 percent compared to the cities with the lowest. That's an enormous amount of miles.

And transportation consultant Bruce Schaller estimates that the app-based taxis have added 5.7 billion driving miles in the nine major cities they primarily operate. (For comparison, in their first year of deployment across the U.S., e-scooters operated by private tech firms carried between 60-80 million trips.)

By the end of this year, Schaller has estimated all taxi ridership will surpass the number of trips made on buses the U.S.

The promise of companies such as Uber and Lyft was that they would "free" city dwellers to sell their cars or not acquire them in the first place. And car ownership has declined among higher wage earners.

But a University of Chicago study found the presence of Uber and Lyft in cities actually increases new vehicle registrations. That's because the companies encourage lower-income people to purchase cars, even advertising in some markets how people should put that new car to use - as an Uber.

They spend half their time 'deadheading'

For every mile a Uber or Lyft car drives with a passenger, it cruises as many miles - if not more - without a passenger, a practice known in the industry as "deadheading." Estimates of total deadheading time vary from 30 percent to as much as 60 percent.

Uber and Lyft's policies make this worse by encouraging drivers to constantly circle to reduce wait times for users, according to John Barrios, the researcher at the University of Chicago, who has studied Uber and Lyft.

They operate in transit-friendly areas

Transit systems around the nation are losing riders to Uber and Lyft, which suggests that the companies are merely showing the need to beef up transit service across the country.

But if you drill down, something else is at work because Uber and Lyft primarily operate in areas that are best served by transit. For example in Seattle, about half the rides taken in Uber and Lyft originate in just four neighborhoods: downtown, Belltown, South Lake Union and Capitol Hill, according to David Gutman at the Seattle Times. These are some of the city's most walkable and transit-friendly areas.

Moreover, according to Schaller, about 70 percent of Uber and Lyft trips take place in just nine American cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, traditional taxi service, Schaller estimates, still serves more total trips in suburban and rural areas than the Ubers and Lyfts.

Why would Uber and Lyft use be so high in dense, transit-rich areas? Studies aren't conclusive, but on average, Uber and Lyft riders, not surprisingly, skew rich and skew young.

In the top nine cities for Uber and Lyft people with incomes above $200,000 are by far the most likely to use the service. Lower-income people without cars in some less urban markets do use Uber and Lyft, but their use is dwarfed by those with high incomes, Schaller finds.

They mostly replace biking, walking or transit trips

In an ideal world, Uber and Lyft would be making good on their promise to reduce private car ownership because city dwellers would feel more comfortable selling their cars, thanks to the presence of Uber and Lyft.

But the data shows that Uber and Lyft mostly "free" people from walking and transit.

A survey of 944 Uber and Lyft riders by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston last year, found that 42 percent of riders would have taken transit if the services hadn't been available. Another 12 percent (like those U.C.L.A students and their 11,000 on-campus taxi rides per week) said they would have biked or walked their journey. Another 5 percent would have just avoided the trip altogether.

Only about 17 percent - less than one in five - said they would have made the journey in a private car otherwise. (The remainder said they would have used a traditional taxi.)

Uber and Lyft just aren't competitive price-wise with private car ownership, Schaller said, except in areas with expensive parking. Even with Uberpool and other shared services - which account for a small share of total business, Schaller says - Uber and Lyft increase car miles on urban streets. For each mile of driving removed, they add about 2.6 miles, he estimates.

They hurt transit

Uber and Lyft are just crushing transit service in the U.S. A recent study estimated, for example, they had reduced bus ridership in San Francisco, for example, 12 percent since 2010 - or about 1.7 percent annually. And each year the services are offered, the effect grows, researcher Gregory Erhardt found.

Every person lured from a bus or a train into a Lyft or Uber adds congestion to the streets and emissions to the air. Even in cities that have made tremendous investments in transit - like Seattle which is investing another $50 billion in light rail - Uber and Lyft ridership recently surpassed light rail ridership.

Transit agencies simply cannot complete with private chauffeur service which is subsidized at below real costs by venture capitalists. And maybe that's the point.

Erhardt, for example, estimated that San Francisco would have had to increase transit service 25 percent overall just to neutralize the effect of Uber and Lyft.

Worse is the tale of two cities effect: Relatively well off people in Ubers congesting the streets of Manhattan and San Francisco slow down buses full of relatively low-income people. By giving people who can afford it escape from the subway, Uber and Lyft also reduce social interaction between people of different classes and lead to a more stratified society.

They reduce political support for transit

As an added kick in the shins, Uber and Lyft degrade political support for transit. If relatively well-to-do people can hop in an Uber or a Lyft every time the bus or train is late, the political imperative to address the problem is reduced. The wealthier people substituting Uber and Lyft for transit trips have disproportionate political influence.

Cities are already capitulating. Last week, Denver partnered with Uber in a last-ditch effort to win back some riders who had jumped to the app.

In addition, right-wing ideologues have argued that Uber and Lyft make transit investment unnecessary.

They increase traffic fatalities

The University of Chicago study mentioned earlier estimated that Uber and Lyft increased traffic fatalities last year by an astonishing 1,100 - an enormous human toll. The study also found, surprisingly, that Uber and Lyft have no effect on drunk driving.

In addition, Uber and Lyft require basically no safety training for their drivers at all. In fact, the presence of these companies has motivated cities like Toronto to eliminate safety training requirements the city previous required for taxi drivers, in order to ostensibly level the playing field.

They hoard their data

One qualification with this list: Much of the information we have about Lyft and Uber is imperfect. The two companies make it difficult to study the social impacts of their activities because they jealously guard their data.

Last year, when Barrios released a study showing a lot of negative impacts from Uber and Lyft, Lyft corporate attacked the study calling it "deeply flawed."

But Barrios had to use Google search numbers to estimate Uber and Lyft penetration in certain markets because even academic researchers don't have access to Uber and Lyft's raw trip data. If Uber and Lyft are honest in their denials, releasing their data could help disprove it. But so far, they have mostly refused.

Oh, and one more thing...

These are just the transportation related drawbacks. To say nothing of these companies treatment of their employees, or the behavior of their top management or their huge financial losses.

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All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List

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Here's the latest evidence that Uber and Lyft are destroying our world: Students at the University of California Los Angeles are taking an astonishing 11,000 app-based taxi trips every week that begin and end within the boundaries of the campus.

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There is something so meaningful with eating something you made with your own hands. It enhances your overall experience and empowers you in several ways. In today's society, it is so easy to order food through apps and get it delivered to your house. However, the convenience of these services obscures the harsh economic reality that its workers face on a daily basis. These companies that offer these services are involved in the sharing economy.The capitalist sharing economy describes a marketplace in which services are provided by individuals, typically through an application. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, over 75% of drivers who work for companies involved in the sharing economy struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis. They do not offer their employees any benefits, and the pay is not stable as their job relies on demand. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/the-dark-side-of-the-sharing-economy/)In fact, some argue that these companies are creating a larger working class in society, which is exacerbating economic inequality. Additionally, the drivers for companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash are all independent contractors, so they do not have to abide by minimum wage legislation. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/uber-drivers-are-protesting-again-heres-what-the-job-is-really-like.html) Therefore, by making your own meal, you are stopping these companies from exploiting their employees. You are helping to resolve this complex issue. (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/uber-convenient-city-commuters-bad-cities-ncna995626) Additionally, according to Cooking Light, a blog filled with food and wellness tips, contends that creating your own food is so relaxing and can be therapeutic for people. In other words, it helps you alleviate your stress and reduce your anxiety. Instead of relying on these apps, it’s beneficial to do something yourself and create your own dinner. Moreover, it is more cost-effective to create your own meals than purchasing them for a restaurant. While it's great to support businesses, over time, according to the Simple dollar, one can spend up to $12,000 if they purchase meals from restaurants twice a day. Also, you will adapt to a healthier lifestyle as you will be in control of what you are consuming. Studies conducted by the University of San Diego have proven that your eating habits heavily impact your happiness. They say that creating your own food will lead to a stronger and healthier lifestyle. They learned that there is a direct correlation between having a healthy lifestyle and one’s happiness and well-being level. Therefore, not only are reducing the economic inequality, you are creating a stronger lifestyle for yourself by preparing your own food.

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Given the current situation of our world, there is so much uncertainty. None of us are aware about what the future has in store. But, there is no need to worry about something that you cannot control. Stressing about something does not alleviate the issue. So, it you need to find contentment through your actions that you can control. This contentement plan is filed with ways you can have a balanced and fulfilled life. I have created these tasks from research papers I have written from my english class held at my local community college. Throughout the course, I have gained a lot of insight on gratification and feeling content with my life in general. It has really opened my eyes to seeing the possibilities of feeling happy.

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Reva Jariwala is an incoming senior in high school! She is a passionate coder, avid reader, and hackathon lover. Reva is a co-founder of the organization, KoderKids, which aims to expose more girls to the limitless world of Computer Science. She is a member of the Danville Youth Council, Scholastic’s Teen Advisory Board, Buddy Project Youth Advisory Board, and the CourAGE Youth Health Coalition. Reva started a blog with the goal of empowering our world with insight and stories of powerful women. She has always been fascinated by how past experiences shape future successes. Reva plans on releasing a book later this year featuring the insight and advice of these remarkable female leaders.