Gendered labour geographies in the cloud

Al James

Chapter 27 in Handbook of Labour Geography, 2025, pp 447-460 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Over 65 million women worldwide find gig work through digital labour platforms, often in response to widely touted platform possibilities for reconciling paid work and family. Yet women remain largely invisible within digital labour research. This chapter engages with women crowdworkers working from home in the UK (using PeoplePerHour, UpWork, TaskRabbit, and Freelancer). It shows how some women successfully use platforms to challenge their spatial fixity and the limits of locally-available, family-friendly work opportunities in ‘analogue’ labour markets. However, it also documents constraints upon workers’ abilities to compete for gigs online due to uneven, gendered divisions of childcare, unpaid household reproductive labour, and local geographies of childcare provision. These constraints suggest that platforms are inscribing new forms of gendered labour market inequality. In response, it identifies coping tactics that women platform workers use to effect improvements in their work lives, albeit without challenging larger technical and societal structures of constraint.

Keywords: Gig economy; Gender; Motherhood; Crowdwork; Platforms; Digital labour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781785363399
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