Racial discrimination in the taxicab industry has long been a problem. Some drivers simply don’t go into predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Others won’t pick up passengers who are African-American.

The dawn of the sharing economy and the launch of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft was supposed to represent a fairer, more equitable alternative.

Unfortunately, according to a new study from MIT Sloan School of Management, Stanford University and the University of Washington, racial bias at ride-sharing companies remains a pervasive problem.

You can hear more about the study directly from one of the study’s authors on Wednesday, Feb. 15, from noon to 12:30 p.m. Eastern. I will be interviewing Chris Knittel (pictured), a professor of applied economics at MIT Sloan who worked on the study, to discuss the research. Knittel, who joins me as part of the MIT Sloan Expert Series, will describe his study and also share insights into how Uber and Lyft can mitigate the problem. The interview can be viewed live on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile video studio. 

Knittel and his colleagues conducted the research in two American cities, Seattle and Boston. In Seattle, Knittel and his colleagues found that African-American passengers waited consistently longer to get picked up by an Uber – as much as 35 percent more than white customers. In addition, the study showed that black customers waited longer than white ones for their Lyft requests to be accepted. This discrepancy translates to about five to 10 seconds. But that is material if you are, say, trying to get to the airport on time or hailing a ride for a job interview.

In Boston, a separate experiment found many more cancellations when a passenger used stereotypically African-American-sounding names such as Jamal or Aisha. “Across all trips, the cancellation rate for black-sounding names was more than double that for stereotypically white-sounding names such as Jerry or Allison,” Knittel wrote in The Conversation.

Fixing the problem represents a big challenge, according to Knittel. Potential remedies include driver education programs, instituting new practices at the ride-sharing companies, and increasing the use of autonomous vehicles.

“We are confident that Uber and Lyft have the technological know-how to continue revolutionizing urban transportation,” he says. “They also now have the evidence that they can and should make changes to their policies and practices to ensure that everyone shares in the benefits of our new economy.”

During the second half of the program, Knittel will take questions from viewers on social media. Questions can be sent using the #MITSloanExperts hashtag on Twitter.

This is a guest post by Rebecca Knight, a Boston-based journalist who writes the Best Practices column for Harvard Business Review. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, USA Today and The Financial Times. 

Photo courtesy of MIT