Platform Inequality: Gender in the Gig-Economy

Abstract

Americans are making extra money renting out a spare room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car. This 'on demand' or so-called 'gig economy' is creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation but it's also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.-Hillary Rodham Clinton 1 ABSTRACT Laboring in the new economy has recently drawn tremendous social, legal, and political debate. The changes created by platform-facilitated labor are considered fundamental challenges to the future of work and are generating contestation regarding the proper classification of laborers as employees or independent contractors. Yet, despite this growing debate, attention to gender dimensions of such laboring is currently lacking. This Article considers the gendered promises and challenges that are associated with platform-facilitated labor, and provides an innovative empirical analysis of gender discrepancies in such labor; it conducts a case study of platform-facilitated labor using

Gender differences in participation and reward on Stack Overflow

“…Many of these studies are concerned with discrimination based on information available on user profiles [55], social feedback by the community as a manifestation of offline discrimination in online context and algorithms reinforcing existing gender biases [53,45,34]. Scholars are also drawing attention to the legal aspects of discrimination and labor market protections in the online world [5].…”

Airtasker and the Australian freelance workers: The reflections on the gig economy

“…As per Barzilay and Ben-David (2016), as the global boundaries have got shrunk because of the modern digital world, now the possibility of working remotely also got increased substantially. These facilities have enabled the organization to hire the people for short-term contract or as freelance workers, where sometimes it not even required visiting the office place for work.…”

“…But, amid of on-going technological revolution where the new smartphones are evolving each day where various new technological features are minimizing the issues and upgrading the usability of the mobile devices (Barzilay and Ben-David, 2016). Due to significant technological improvements the mobile devices became more efficient, effective and user-friendly.…”

Careers Delivered from the Kitchen? Immigrant Women Small-scale Entrepreneurs Working in the Growing Nordic Platform Economy

“…However, given that much of the labour in gig work is largely invisible as it replicates intersectional vulnerabilities, it is perhaps not exceptional that the production side of services has been under examined. Evidence shows that in the gig economy, women still request less wages and there is a gender bias in the production and use of technology in digital forms (Barzilay & Ben-David, 2017;Foong, Vincent, Hecht, & Gerber, 2018;McLean, Maalsen, & Prebble, 2019). Moreover, gig work continues the normative positionality of the male, able-bodied, flexible and unencumbered with caring responsibilities worker as the ideal.…”

“…Global economic shifts coupled with the development of digital technology over the last two decades have rapidly given way to the emergence of the gig economy-also known as the platform, digital, sharing, or collaborative economy-as an emerging global phenomenon. An intersectional perspective to understanding the gig economy is sorely lacking with some notable exceptions (see Adams & Berg, 2017;Barzilay & Ben-David, 2017;Duffy & Pruchniewska, 2017;Hunt & Samman, 2019). Intersectionality refers to the interrelated and overlapping of social categories such as gender, race and class amongst others which are mutually constitutive creating systems of oppression and discrimination (Crenshaw, 1991;Valentine, 2007).…”