Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Importance of Openness to New Experiences and Positivity in Reducing Gender and Racial Disparities in the Online Workplace

Discrimination does not disappear in digital labor markets. It takes different forms. Using 27,871 U.S.-based Upwork profiles, this study examines how gender and racial earnings disparities persist within a platform framed as meritocratic. Drawing on impression management, signaling theory, and affect-as-information perspectives, we conceptualize freelancer profiles as active signal spaces rather than neutral listings of skills. Female freelancers and all minoritized racial groups earn less than their white male counterparts, even after accounting for observable indicators of productivity, reputation, and experience. These disparities appear to be shaped in part by platform-level structures, including algorithmic search ranking and badge-tier architecture. Profile-level signals of emotional valence and openness to new experiences are associated with earnings, but these associations vary across groups. For Black freelancers, each unit of expressed joy is associated with approximately 4.6 percent higher earnings, and signals of openness with an apparent elimination of their disadvantage. For Middle Eastern freelancers, openness signals are associated with an estimated 40.8 percent decrease in earnings, indicating that personality cues are not valued uniformly across racial groups. Formal education is negatively associated with earnings, suggesting a boundary condition for human capital theory in algorithmically mediated labor markets where behavioral and reputational signals carry greater weight.