Blech, it turns out, women make less money selling on eBay than men

If it wasn’t annoying enough that men make more money than women at their jobs, we just found out that there’s a gender pay gap for eBay users, too. What gives?

A new study published in the Journal Science Advances on Friday has found that women earn 80 cents for each dollar that men make when selling shiny new things on eBay. When it comes to preowned stuff, the gap closes significantly, but it’s still there—women make 97 cents for every male-earned dollar.

Tamar Kricheli-Katz, a sociologist and legal scholar from Tel Aviv University, and Tali Regev, an economist from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, sourced eBay data from the years 2009 through 2012. The researchers came to their conclusions after studying the sales of 420 of eBay’s most popular products across every category.

However, women did outshine men in some categories. Ladies tended to have higher ratings from other users. They also earned more money than men in some sales categories, including baby and pet products.

An interesting thing to note is that eBay does not actually include the gender of the seller on its site. Tamar and Tali insist that gender can usually be determined based on what else that seller has put up for auction, but we find it hard to believe that this method is accurate every time—or even a lot of times.

The researchers say that their findings support the hypothesis that a lower value is projected onto the wares of female sellers.

“We expected to find a gap, but we were surprised at the magnitude, especially because the biggest effect was for new products where women and men are selling exactly the same thing,” Tamar told Christian Science Monitor.

In case you forgot, the gender pay gap is valued at approximately 21 percent. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that in 2014, women who worked full-time made 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Sigh. Isn’t it time the economy ran without gender bias?