Platform labour mobility and gender inequality in the gig economy

Al James

Chapter 17 in Handbook of Labour Mobility, 2026, pp 287-303 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Over the last decade, labour geographers have analysed the dramatic, digital transformations of work and employment that have accompanied the growth of platform-mediated work in the ‘gig economy’. An estimated 170 million women globally access gig work through platforms – with many workers seduced by widespread celebratory claims of new digital opportunities for female upward mobility vis-à-vis ‘analogue labour markets’. To interrogate these claims, this chapter brings key insights from labour mobilities studies into new productive conversation with research on gender relations of platform production. Within this hybrid frame, it reveals women's distinctive entry pathways into platform work, constrained job-to-job mobilities within and across platforms, tactics to build platform mobility in the face of family care responsibilities and gendered algorithmic bias, and shifting patterns of platform dis/engagement over the lifecourse. The chapter also offers a series of urgent research questions, which early career scholars might usefully take up to advance a dynamic and inclusive labour mobilities research agenda that feminises our understandings of worker im/mobility in platform capitalism.

Keywords: Digital Labour; Platforms; Algorithms; Gender; Mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035331680
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