The online, desk-based gig economy, sometimes known as cloudwork or crowdwork, has been growing rapidly in recent years. Everything from transcriptions to legal services can be bought by clients on digital labour platforms like freelancer.com from gig workers anywhere in the world.

Cloudwork has been touted as a gender-inclusive form of labour which eliminates gender biases and gives women the freedom to live the working lives that suits them. Upwork promotes its platform as being “for a new generation of women” who can build “careers that lead to both financial and personal freedom”. Academic studies have talked up cloudwork’s potential to “help women sidestep traditional barriers”.

Al James, professor of Economic Geography at Newcastle University, has a more critical view of the gendered aspects of digital labour. For the last half-decade he has been interviewing female online gig workers in the UK to find out why they do online gig work and what their experience of it has been. He summarises many of his findings on his research project website, Gendered Digital Labour.

In this podcast, the Gig Economy Project speaks to James about his recently published paper, “Women in the gig economy: Feminising ‘digital labour’”.

We discuss:

01:00: What motivates James’ research?

03:47: What do female online gig workers have in common?

10:28: The discourse about female online gig work versus the reality

22:53: Female exploitation and abuse on online digital labour platforms

34:13: Platform care work

42:33: Lack of feminist perspectives in academic research on the platform economy

(Picture by Jennie Temple. See more of Jennie's art at the Gendered Digital Labour site (research funded by the British Academy).)