The advent of new technologies and digital platforms has given way to a surge in gig contracts, and various forms of independent work. Although the majority of the platform workforce is composed of men, there has been a notable increase of women’s participation in platform work since 2000, with the growth rate among women surpassing that of men (Palagashvili & Suarez 2021). Considering this fact, it is surprising to discover that, while there has been a considerable focus on independent workers and the gig economy overall, there remains a gap in research when it comes to how women participate in this evolving labour market.
For this reason, I found particular interest in this year’s conference of the Global Digital Cultures research collective, titled Global Perspectives on Platforms, Labor & Social Reproduction. Among the many compelling ideas that were presented, the panel ‘Situating Gender and/in Platform Labor’ particularly inspired me as it offered alternative attempts to fill the above-mentioned gap through different researchers’ studies on various gendered experience in gig economy, with specific case studies from Indonesia, Brazil, India and Kenya among others.
A panel that addresses this topic is important not only because of the underrepresentation of women gig workers, but also because even less research has been done in the Global South, outside of the Western context, an area that is crucial to explore in order to recalibrate platform labor research, which was also the aim of the conference.
As a contribution to this issue, in this blog post, I will first discuss and highlight some important findings of the Gender and Platform Work report, identifying challenges that women platform workers have to face, since only by starting with an understanding of these challenges can we realise how to ensure equitable treatment and safety. To gain insights from women in this field, I will discuss a study on women platform workers in Kenya.
Having understood the typical challenges that women face and how platforms often institutionalise them, I will argue that, in a context where policies are slow to be put in place, women have had to find other ways to improve their working conditions. I will discuss the role of online groups as a form of resistance and collective empowerment for women in platform work. In essence, I argue that online groups should be recognized as platforms for solidarity and investigated as they could be used for opportunities of organising within the broader framework of the platform economy.
Exploring the dynamics of these online spaces contributes to our understanding of how women navigate and negotiate their positions in the gig economy.
Platform work and gender
Precarity characterises employment statuses such as part-time employment, temporary work, zero-hour contracts, and contingent employment which don’t offer economic security (ILO, 2016).
In comparison to the so-called conventional employment, these types of employment are associated with low pay, low predictability, limited social security and labor rights.
It is important to highlight that precarity displays significant gender inequalities. The widely recognised gender wage gap shows that women routinely earn less than men around the world. According to the ILO (2016): “The greater domestic and care responsibilities of women influence their choice of occupations, so that when they do participate in the labour market, they are often limited in the jobs that they can take on” (p. 119). Therefore, it appears that atypical employment is preferred by women as it allows for greater flexibility, making it supposedly simpler to balance work and personal commitments than full-time employment.
Platforms have facilitated increased access to precarious work. It has been noted that platform work has comparatively lower barriers to entry, the sign-up procedure is typically automated and, because it is considered ‘gig work,’ both platforms and employees have to make fewer commitments. Due to this, it is the favoured option for people who are barred from more formal types of employment, attracting workers who are already precarious and vulnerable (Fairwork 2023, 12).
The Fairwork project is based at the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and through a global network of researchers, they conduct research on digital labour platforms and artificial intelligence. This year, they published the Gender and Platform Work report, which was based on the examination of the working conditions on online platforms developed during the last 5 years and in 38 countries, within over 190 unique platforms that connect individual service providers with consumers of the service through the platform interface. The ultimate goal of the report is to assess the working situation in order to give platforms suggestions on how to do better, to show that fairer jobs are possible.
They used an intersectional lens, acknowledging that people’s race, caste, age, location and other demographic characteristics influence the experience of being a woman or a gender minority.
The report highlights that there is a recurring pattern where platforms operate under the assumption that their ideal worker is an autonomous, highly efficient, digitally savvy man that doesn’t have other obligations, such as family responsibilities. This ideal worker is perceived as primarily motivated by short-term gains and incentivised to follow predictable patterns of behaviour. This predictability is central to the platform economy’s ability to tap into a vast workforce of interchangeable individuals, managed by algorithms that precisely determine when and where to deploy them. Deviation from this ideal platform worker, whether due to factors such as gender, sexual orientation, or other socio-cultural characteristics, is largely overlooked, resulting in platforms that are essentially ‘gender blind’. In ignoring gender effectively, this approach ends up institutionalising obstacles that prevent women and gender minorities from participating and engaging in platform-based work. Consequently, it solidifies a gender-based divide in the kinds of work accessible to them. This inadvertently undermines the progress made in securing gender-related rights that have historically been safeguarded in conventional employment (5).
Building upon this, it becomes evident that platforms are either insufficiently responsive or plainly neglectful in addressing the challenges faced by women workers. In some instances, their actions exacerbate the existing issues. Having clarified the general gender-blind approach of platforms in the gig economy, it is imperative to gain insights from the experience of women and to delve into the specific challenges they face, to understand the disparities and vulnerabilities they encounter and to start thinking about why online groups might be specifically helpful for them.
Challenges for women platform workers
In the Fairwork report, key problematics have been identified, and to provide a more contextualized understanding of these challenges, I want to refer to a study conducted by Savita Bailur, Grace Natabaalo and Nasubo Ongoma, who presented it at the GDC conference. Gaining an understanding of the specific experiences of women working on platforms in different countries allows for a more nuanced perspective that goes beyond general trends and acknowledges that local contexts have a role in how platform work is perceived and carried out. Compared to women in the Global North, women in the South not only have less access to platforms, but they also gain less from using them (Faith and Banga 2021). It is important to remember that technology is not gender neutral and that women in the Global South are impacted differently by ongoing gaps in access. This underscores the need to avoid generalizing findings and concepts from the North to women workers in the South.
The study I’m referencing sheds light on the specific manifestations of these problems in Kenya, providing examples that fit with what the report has found. Firstly, it resulted that women are more likely to experience discrimination, violence and harassment while working. Due to the inherently unequal power dynamics of feminised work, platforms shouldn’t be remaining neutral, as they often do by positioning themselves as mere intermediaries connecting workers and clients. The extent of information disclosed by platforms to clients and workers, the commission rates and client fees they impose, and their policies regarding safety nets like insurance and social security, collectively contribute to either empowering workers within this context or indirectly facilitating their exploitation. Therefore, if no measures to guarantee fair working conditions are implemented, the workers are exposed to increased risks and are more susceptible to exploitation. On the other hand, even when platforms recognise the vulnerability of female workers, they often address it with protective measures, like permitting workers to select their clients’ gender or enabling them to leave a client’s location if they feel unsafe. These actions essentially promote and implement gender-based separation but may not necessarily enhance women’s safety, potentially limiting their income-earning prospects at the same time (Fairwork 2023,16). In addition, through these actions, platforms continue to reinforce the notion that the experience of female platform workers revolves around a lack of safety.
In the study in Kenya, women interviewed reported being sexually assaulted. Olivia, a delivery person based in Nairobi, said: “Some customers pretend that they are afraid of the motorbike, and they hold you and, in the process, they start caressing you. They take advantage and sexually assault you.” (Bailur et al. 2022, 35). She then decided not to ride again in the evening after 19:00 for fear of being physically assaulted.
Another delivery rider said that a half-naked client wanted her to come inside his house to collect the money. Since she refused, she had to go back with the food to the point of dispatch. Since the order wasn’t completed, they charged her for it (35).
These anecdotes echo the broader concerns of the report. They exemplify how the platform economy’s gender-blind approach and the lack of adequate safeguards can expose women workers to dangerous situations and economic losses. Moreover, they make clear how the platforms’ ‘neutrality’ doesn’t provide security for women and it hinders instead their possibilities of earning money.
As a second point, while platform work has been advertised by many as offering much greater flexibility for workers, employers and customers than traditional employment contracts, as “workers can supposedly choose what to do, how, when, where and for whom” (Woodcock & Graham, 2020), often this has turned out to not be the reality. In fact, many workers worry that if they don’t accept enough jobs their cancellation rate will be affected and, as a result, also their position in the platform and the amount of work they will be able to receive in the future. Additionally, since many platforms classify workers as self-employed, benefits such as maternity leave, sick leave and anti-discrimination regulations for protected categories are disregarded very often. Consequently, women and gender minority workers find themselves without an essential safety net, exacerbating gender-based disparities that arise due to the inflexible nature of platform work.
Considering the study in Kenya, we find that flexibility often means a “double shift” (Bailur 2022, 35), as many women reported that often they missed out on work because they weren’t online due to the fact that they had to manage the house at the same time.
Women are often burdened with the expectation of balancing paid employment alongside domestic work, and in these situations flexibility becomes a double-edged sword.
In order to analyse the situation in Kenya, the authors apply the Gender at Work framework (Gender at Work 2021), which states that change can be institutional/systemic or individual, and it can also be formal or informal. Under the framework, genuine empowerment of women can’t be achieved by just granting access to resources or enacting supportive laws and policies, but it also needs a dismantling of constraining normative beliefs that keep women in dependence and challenging the everyday institutions that perpetuate gender inequality. Considering this, they conclude that change has been slow not only regarding formal laws and policies but especially consciousness and informal norms.
So, while policies are important to achieve empowerment, they highlight that social change outside the platform is crucial.
Building on the recognition of the challenges that women encounter in the platform workforce, I want to focus on their resourcefulness in improving their working conditions. As women struggle with the constraints of slowly enacted policies, the role of online groups becomes paramount. I argue that investigating the potential of online groups is a way to explore the active strategies employed by women in navigating and negotiating their positions within the ever-evolving gig economy.
Online groups as a form of resistance
It has been recognised that online communication channels including social media groups, chats, and forums have been useful for generating demands, exchanging ideas, and organizing otherwise isolated workers, and that numerous of these initiatives have developed into grassroots organisations led by coworkers (ILO 2022). However, as it is the case in most research on the topic, the focus has mainly been Europe.
In another study about collective bargaining in the platform economy, data was included from respondents from ten different countries (Argentina, Chile, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco and Ukraine). Investigating in which form platform workers engage collectively, it was found that they mostly organised on Facebook, WhatsApp, or on other social media groups (ILO 2022). In both cases, no difference between men and women platform workers was taken into account. However, as we have seen, women often face a specific set of additional challenges related to platform work that platforms themselves fail to acknowledge. Therefore, I argue that there is a need to shift focus and conduct targeted research in this specific direction.
A great example of how women’s experiences should be researched further is given by the case study of women beauty workers in India, presented by Chiara Furtado at the GDC conference. In an article written together with Abhishek Sekharan and Ambika Tandon, she traces the history of collectivisation for women, finding that they disproportionately face barriers in organising, especially due to their concentration in sectors characterised by informality (Sekharan et al. 2022, 50). Because of that, they suffered a lack of legal recognition as workers.
Then, they illustrate how the barriers are even doubled in the platform economy due to continual non-recognition by the state and platforms, while “formal collective action is also constrained by the misclassification of platform workers as ‘independent contractors’” (51).
They also identify similar challenges to the one of the Fairwork report, such as lack of social security benefits, unclear employment status, being forced to keep a low cancellation rate and algorithmic control that can stratify workers based on ratings (52).
Through the interview they conducted among women platform workers, they found that women use online groups to address the challenges they face. These groups function as central hubs of information exchange, where workers can ask questions and discuss various work-related policies. This includes topics like purchasing equipment, subscription fees, and deductions from their earnings. In many respects, these online communities play a vital role in addressing the information asymmetry and biases inherent in the platform economy. They provide a platform for workers to openly share concerns and seek resolutions to their issues. Additionally, these groups serve as extended networks of care and support, compensating for the absence of such support from the platform itself. (53)
I want to argue that online groups in this case seem to provide a solution to the problem of isolation of women in platform work. In fact, it was noted in the Fairwork report that women often feel more vulnerable because they experience isolation at work as a result of their gender identity and examples are provided where male colleagues would discriminate against women and make them feel unwelcome and uncomfortable (Fairwork 2023, 19).
This can reinforce disparities between male and female coworkers, since male workers share with each other tips on how to increase their earnings while women get left out, with a perpetuation of the gender divide within the platform work ecosystem as a result. (19)
Instead, as the case study in India exemplifies, women could use online groups to create a community they can rely on.
This is being further investigated by Gabriela Salomão, who presented at the GDC conference the research she is conducting on female platform drivers in Brazil. She found that women were using WhatsApp not only as a space to exchange information but also as a space where they could feel accepted, and that provides a sense of belonging.
It is noteworthy that this kind of “antidote” for platform isolation relies on other platforms, such as WhatsApp and online groups. While platform work can perpetuate gender divides and isolation, these digital communities demonstrate the potential for empowerment and collective action within the platform economy.
While here I have discussed studies based in India and Brazil, given the relevance that it seems these groups could have as tools for workers to connect and organise, it would be interesting and productive to further investigate in different countries to assess if similar groups are adopted or to examine what ways women are finding to navigate the issues in the current and evolving platform economy.
Literature
Bailur, Savita, Grace Natabaalo, and Nasubo Ongoma. “The experience of women platform workers in Kenya” Global perspectives on women, work, and digital labour platforms (2022), 32-38.
Gender at Work (2021) Gender at work framework. Gender at Work. [online] Available at: https://genderatwork.org/analytical-framework/
Fairwork (2023) Gender and Platform Work: Beyond Techno- solutionism. Oxford, United Kingdom; Berlin, Germany.
Faith, Becky and Banga, Karishma, How Digitally Restructured Value Chains Are Reshaping Labor Futures for Women in the Global South (December 17, 2021).
ILO. (2022) New wine in old bottles: organizing and collective bargaining in the platform economy.
ILO. (2016) Non-standard employment around the world: understanding challenges, shaping prospects.
ILO. (2022). Realizing the opportunities of the platform economy through freedom of association and collective bargaining (Working Paper No. 80).
Palagashvili, Liya and Suarez, Paola, “Women as Independent Workers in the Gig Economy”. Mercatus Working Paper Series (March 29, 2021)
Sekharan, Abhishek, Chiara Furtado, and Ambika Tandon. “Gender and collective bargaining in the platform economy: experiences of on-demand beauty workers in India” Global perspectives on women, work, and digital labour platforms (2022), 48-55.
Woodcock, Jamie and Graham, Mark. The gig economy : a critical introduction.Cambridge, UK; Medford, Mass.: Polity Press, 2020.
Author Bio
Sara Ungari is currently a student in the Research Master of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam specializing in Film Studies.
