This roundtable will centre on the challenges and opportunities in the platform economy, and the role – or lack thereof – played by women. The platform economy has been seen as an opportunity to bring women into paid work. It has been argued that the flexibility that platforms offer in terms of hours of working and space can enable women to balance paid work with care work. As the cost of data drops and mobile phone ownership increases, it is likely that women in the global south are being brought within the fold of the digital economy. Sectors which have historically constituted women like domestic work, beauty, and wellness too are getting digitised, thereby opening up new avenues for women to access paid work. Microwork and freelance platforms too present new opportunities which enable women to challenge sociocultural norms around the role of women in society and within the household. However, this potential remains largely unrealised due to several challenges that have become endemic to the manner in which the digital economy has unfolded globally. The digital gender gap continues to remain significant, creating immense barriers for meaningful access and use. This gap also extends to digital literacy and skills, with the implications that even women who have gained access have not been enabled to utilise digital tools to enhance their income or move into new forms of work. The gender gap in access is compounded by the replication of occupational segregation in the digital economy, with women continuing to be concentrated in sectors with low wages and devaluation of skills, while being left out of sectors that are seen as masculine domains and which generally command higher pay. This ranges from sectors as diverse as data management to transportation. Further, in a parallel to outsourcing in manufacturing two decades ago, the forms of labour that have opened up to feminised work forces can be exploitative and even demeaning. Discourses around empowerment through the digital economy need to be qualified with the discussion of the conditions of precarity, the absence of social security, and unstable work arrangements that have become the norm in the platform economy. Exploitation of labour, wages, and data by large multinational corporations places workers in a disempowered position and can replicate or even worsen inequality along the lines of gender, income, and geographic locations. This session will explore these questions through a focused discussion on the manner in which employment relationships are being re-organised and disguised as self-employment and empowerment, and its impact on the feminised work force. It will highlight alternative forms of organising the platform economy, and further think through the manner in which the mainstream platform economy can be re-organised to integrate sustainable models of work. In doing so, we will also bring into focus ongoing forms of collective bargaining that have been devised in the context of the digital.
