When Grace started as a food delivery courier in Edinburgh in 2016, she was one of just two women doing it in the city. She appreciated being able to choose her hours for Deliveroo, fitting them around the study for her master’s degree. “I liked the independence and the idea of not having someone micromanaging me or looking over my shoulder as I worked,” says Grace. “Once I started, I realized those things were there, but in more subtle ways.” The fees started getting lower, and the journeys got longer. Like many of her friends doing gig economy work, Grace switched to delivering full-time with other platforms, including UberEats, Just Eat, and Citysprint, after putting her MA on hold. Often working a 60-hour week, it generated just about enough for her to live on.
But more courier work meant more exposure to harassment and unwanted attention, more everyday sexism, and more anxiety about her safety as she cycled the streets of Edinburgh. “If I was waiting for an order with other male riders, we’d sit waiting in the restaurant on our phones—but the waiters would come to me asking all the questions—how long have you been doing this? How strong are you? Do you live alone?” says Grace, who, like the other gig workers WIRED interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified in order to protect her privacy. “Several times, restaurant staff have taken my phone number from the app to contact me privately on my phone.”
Like many women working in the global gig economy, Grace adjusts her behavior to cope, and just gets on with it. She daren’t complain to the restaurants or platforms, for fear of losing out on income. Recent estimates by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford suggest that over 163 million people worldwide secure income from paid work through digital labor platforms, and there has been a five-fold increase over the past decade. And although still in the minority, the share of women engaging in the digital economy has risen in recent years, whether that’s residential cleaning at the drop of a hat, delivering groceries in under 15 minutes, or filing someone else’s tax return.
But women working in the gig economy are more likely than men to face discrimination and sexual harassment at work. Their vulnerability at work means they often have to avoid taking on the most lucrative jobs, and when they do face abuse or harassment, there are rarely any ways for them to get help. More often than not, platforms that claim to be “gender agnostic” are designed based on an assumption that men’s experiences are the norm, leaving them blind to women’s realities.
“Women often develop their own mechanisms for dealing with this,” says Savita Bailur, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the research director at Caribou Digital, a research consultancy firm working to help build ethical digital economies. “But with gender-sensitive design, they really shouldn’t have to.”
Women working for platforms in customer-facing roles aren’t the only ones who face routine abuse.
On the crowd work platform Upwork, which is used by 12 million freelancers, communication must happen through Zoom. Although there’s no stipulation to keep the camera on, Paloma, a designer who lives in New York and has been working full-time through the platform for almost a year, says she’s received criticism around her camera use. After agreeing to a last-minute meeting with a potential client on a Sunday morning, she kept her camera off. His response? “‘Oh, come on, just throw on a nice shirt and a smile.’” It tipped her over the edge. “I told him I found it really sexist, because he’d never say that to a man,” explains Paloma. “He claimed it was a professional request and didn’t care what I looked like, which frustrated me more as suddenly it became all about him, when I was just trying to do him a favor and put my best foot forward.”
Paloma finds that clients make snap judgements on her skills, from men grilling her in interviews to their doubting that she could design anything masculine or gender-neutral in its aesthetic. She—rightly—suspects that women on the platform charge less than their male counterparts. According to a 2022 World Economic Forum study of 6,000 US-based Upwork freelancers who had billed at least 100 hours of work over a six-month period, there was a stark pay inequality, with male freelancers charging $22.28 more on average per hour for their work compared to women. This means self-employed women on the platform face a gender pay gap nearly three times wider than those in full-time jobs. Accounting platform FreshBooks found that in 2018, a fifth of women said they had to bill less than their male counterparts to get and keep clients.
Paloma says she reported the sexist client to Upwork’s customer service chatbot (which is outsourced to other Upwork freelancers), but she didn’t expect it to go anywhere. “They told me that if there are repercussions, I’m not entitled to know—and that I should have a nice day,” she says. “Anyone can acknowledge receipt of a complaint, and just do nothing.”
Upwork spokesperson Elisabeth Hutchinson says that trust and safety on the platform is a “top priority” for Upwork. “Discriminatory language or behaviour based on gender is strictly prohibited under our terms of service (ToS), and we take swift action to address these violations when they are brought to our attention,” she says. “In general, we do not publicly disclose the outcome of our investigations in order to protect the privacy of our customers and to prevent ill-intentioned users from gathering information that might allow them to evade the measures we have in place to ensure compliance with our ToS.”
When researching the experiences of UK women accessing white-collar gig work from home through popular crowd work platforms such as PeoplePerHour, Upwork, and TaskRabbit, Al James, a Professor of Economic Geography at Newcastle University, says he heard of frequent uneasy interactions with male clients and potential clients. For example, multiple platforms require a headshot in worker profiles, which often prompts unwanted comments about appearance and looks. Some freelancers likened clients’ use of the platform to the dating app Tinder, he says.
As James points out, even if a client’s account gets suspended by the platform, it’s easy to create a new one. “The client that posts the bad job or who behaves like an asshole can essentially just keep doing it,” he explains. “But it’s always the worker who loses out—one woman I spoke with couldn’t change her name after her divorce and had to make an entirely new profile, losing her work history and all that algorithmic capital she’d built up on that name.”
Customers also have substantial power over freelancers because of the importance of the rating systems on most platforms, which feed into the algorithms that manage workers. These are often opaque, but it’s common for platform workers to be penalized for turning down too many jobs or for attracting too many low ratings. These rating systems aren’t necessarily neutral.
Elodie, a translator who lives in Hamburg, started selling her services on Fiverr six months ago to fit around her second child, and has noticed some male clients getting irate with her when her kids are audible or when she has her youngest on her knee during video calls. “It was just a feeling I had, but then I got a really negative review, about being unprofessional and ‘distracted’ during a briefing,” she says. “I have worked so hard already and am now accepting lower rates than I want just to counteract that bad review.”
For another client, Elodie had to extend a deadline when her baby was sick. It was met with no empathy and she was ghosted when she offered to do the remainder of the work for free. “Ultimately, the maternity discrimination is of a similar flavor to my former full-time employer,” she says. “And although I can’t see the side-eyeing of the men in the room, it comes out in my reviews and the way I’m spoken to.”
These experiences run counter to one of the supposed attractions of gig worker platforms for women—that flexible work would allow them to fit their jobs around parenting or caregiving responsibilities. Of 5,000 gig economy workers surveyed by the European Institute for Gender Equality in 2022, more women (36 percent) had chosen it because it could fit alongside household and caring responsibilities than men (28 percent).
For women working in customer-facing gigs, like delivering food or driving ride hail vehicles, algorithmic management can force them into difficult decisions. A 2023 report by Fairwork, a research project coordinated by the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, found that many women said they didn’t feel they could freely cancel jobs on various platforms for fear of being punished by the platform for poor metrics, such as the rate at which they accept jobs. Because workers only find out the destination of a job when they accept it, many women rush their night-time gigs so that they can return home to safety as quickly as possible.
Newcastle University’s James says that women earning through on-demand urban service delivery frequently experienced physical and sexual abuse, and often their only recourse to action is avoiding certain shifts, therefore missing out on more lucrative surge pricing. The working environments also totally ignore their needs. “Public and employer-provided toilet facilities are rare—women are changing their sanitary pads behind bins and urinating in bottles, because there’s no other option,” says James.
To make it on a gig economy platform, a woman must be constantly available, smiling, subservient, and fast. An injury has temporarily stopped Grace from working as a bike courier, but she’s had to keep logging into the app so the accounts stay active and she doesn’t lose her rankings completely. “UberEats has a system where the more you work, the more points you gain, and with a higher level of points, you have access to different benefits,” she says.
Matthew Price, general manager of Uber Eats UK, said in a statement: “We want every courier who uses our platform to have the best experience possible. Couriers can choose when and where they go online with total flexibility. Customer support is available to every courier as standard and we provide free insurance to help cover during periods of illness depending on their circumstances. We know that the vast majority of couriers are satisfied with their experience on the app, however we regularly engage with couriers to look at how we can improve their experience.”
According to a UK study conducted by the research and policy organization Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX) in 2021, some 18 percent of app-based couriers had experienced some form of sexual harassment at work, a statistic that jumps to 57 percent for women and non-binary people. But FLEX found 73 percent of courier respondents said that if they experienced issues about safety at work, they didn’t report it because it wouldn’t have made any difference, while 15 percent did report it and nothing was done. Some 43 percent of courier respondents have been afraid of having their account closed for complaining about unfair treatment, and 16 percent for complaining about harassment or abuse at work.
At the moment, Grace is doing part-time work that isn’t enabled by a gig work platform. Although it’s enjoyable, she’ll probably pick the courier jobs back up again when she’s physically able and the weather has improved. “I’ve been doing it for so long, and although personally, it’s associated with a specific kind of stress and I worry about it taking over my life again, I’d still recommend gig work like mine to women,” she explains. “I hate the companies and they should be doing so much more to help all workers, but the work itself I love—it’s made me more confident, strong, and independent."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
