“I have to be honest,” says Anjali Krishan. “I didn’t realise how bad things can get for women and gender minorities in the platform industry. The amount of discrimination and abuse they face – there’s just such a pervasive sense of fear.”
A cultural anthropologist, Krishan has been studying the experiences of women and gender minorities for almost a decade. It was in India, while researching a rise in suicides among married women, that she first became interested in the effects of unpaid labour – and in the correlation between work and gender.
In a new report published on Monday by the Fairwork project, Krishan and her co-author Kavita Dattani turn their attention to location-based digital platform work – including ride hailing, food delivery and at-home beauty treatments – and the ways in which the gig economy can aggravate gender inequalities.
Conducted over four years, 38 countries and 180 platforms, the report’s three-part data collection strategy saw an international team of researchers interview more than 5,000 workers. What they discovered is an economy where failures to ensure safe working conditions and tackle gender-based discrimination are “commonplace”.
“There were so many reports of violence and abuse,” Krishan says. “The thing that really came to the fore was the incidence of sexual harassment. I didn’t expect them to have to deal with so much – it was shocking.”
The report explains that the masculinisation of driving and delivery roles mean that women are more likely to take on domestic work within a client’s home – removing them from the relative safety of public spaces. “Every time they enter a client’s home they’re wondering: ‘Is this person going to be good or bad?,’” Krishan says.
Krishan cites the example of a worker in India performing a beauty treatment at a client’s home, only to then be asked to stay and cook – a scenario she describes as very common.
“When workers are asked to do extra pieces of work that aren’t included in the official service, they can’t say no – there’s this huge power imbalance,” Dattani says. “Clients have a lot more voice on the platform, and it means workers get drawn into extra or possibly unpaid work.”
Such attitudes are, according to the report, by no means unique to India. Dattani, a feminist researcher of digital technologies whose previous work has centred on techno-masculinist logics – the tendency of digital platforms to assume all workers are men – points to the US. Here, she says, workers caring for elderly people reported feeling pressure to carry out extra cleaning for their clients, leading to unpaid labour.
Elsewhere in the US, workers described carrying guns to protect themselves from clients – with black women reporting that they feel particularly at risk. “We know that in the US, black people experience feeling unsafe in white neighbourhoods, as well as extreme levels of policing. Those two things compound experiences of inequity.”
The second reason for the popularity of feminised work, Krishan and Dattani explain, is the comparatively low barrier to entry. Private hire driving generally requires a considerable upfront investment – for instance, a car – while work in the home does not. Platform roles generally also remove the need for a traditional interview, which is appealing to those who are socially stigmatised.
This, Krishan says, is especially true for divorced or single mothers in countries such as Egypt, Bangladesh and India – where she has firsthand experience of the invasive nature of interviews. “They asked me if I was married, who I live with, what my mother does,” she says. “Eventually they said: ‘We can tell that you’re the right type of person, that you come from a good family.’”
For those less fortunate than Krishan, a role where fewer questions are asked has its attractions. In countries including Belgium, Argentina and the UK, migrants and refugees without the right to work reported taking on gig work by substitution, ie working in place of the person registered with the platform.
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“I really believe this puts the worker in a very precarious position,” Krishan says. “If you are working as a substitute and something bad happens to you, you won’t complain because you don’t feel like you have the right. It just allows exploitation to take place.”
In the UK, women were found to be taking on platform work as a temporary cure for burnout – teachers and NHS workers joining the gig economy as a way to recover from the effects of the Covid pandemic. “They kept talking about what a relief it is after the enormous emotional burden of working in these services,” says Krishan.
Despite women joining the gig economy in the quest for more freedom, researchers found little evidence of platform flexibility. Instead, workers described limiting their roles to safer neighbourhoods and declining work at night, effectively widening the gender pay gap.
In countries such as Bangladesh and Paraguay, Krishan says platforms have had some success in combating these issues by requesting identification from clients – a practice which, although not widespread, allows workers to vet and flag those who use their services. However, other attempts at safety features have proved less successful.
Krishan points again to India, where she says platforms banned women from working after 6pm and from delivering heavy groceries. “The platforms usually realise ‘oh, this was terrible’ and change these policies,” Krishan says. “But in the meanwhile, people have lost income that they really can’t afford.
“So much of it is just the platform not listening to the women,” she says. “They’d rather come up with a very complicated algorithmic solution than just talk to them. And as a woman, that’s so frustrating.”