Policy Paths for a More Inclusive Platform Economy: What Can We Learn from Existing Practices?

Introduction

The terms ‘platform economy’ and ‘gig economy’ have come to refer to a multi-sided economic system, wherein the platform company acts as a mediator of goods and services connecting customers and workers. Work in the platform economy, although still a small share of the economy in most countries, has been receiving attention for its exponential growth and occupation of grey space between formality and informality. In the global north, the debate on the platform economy has focused on the erosion of social security systems and threats to hard-won gains in protecting workers’ rights. In countries in the global south however, the narrative from companies has been overwhelmingly that of job creation translating into upward social mobility. Special attention has also been brought towards women workers as beneficiaries of the platform economy, as it allows flexible and part-time opportunities that can be used to balance paid and care work.

Despite the enthusiasm, the platform economy poses several challenges for workers’ rights, including precarity of income, absence of social security, and high levels of surveillance and monitoring among others. Policy discussions have highlighted a range of responses to these challenges, some of which have also been reflected in law and judicial action in countries such as the United Kingdom, Netherlands and India. Most prominent among these responses is the recognition of the misclassification of location-based gig work as self-employment, forcing companies to provide employment benefits to workers. Other areas of regulation include the provision of social security and pushing for transparency in algorithms that determine workers’ pay structures.

Some emerging literature has been focused on the experiences of economically marginalised groups, including women and migrant workers. Gendered occupational segregation is prominent in the allocation of jobs in the platform economy, with women workers over-represented in jobs and sectors considered ‘feminine’. Examples include sectors such as domestic and care work, and beauty and wellness. In gender unequal societies, fewer women have access to opportunities in the platform economy, particularly those that are high-paying. These challenges also exist for inter-country and intra-country migrant workers, who constitute a large majority of the workforce in low-paying jobs in the platform economy. Platform features such as rating systems and filtering of workers also leave workers vulnerable to discrimination on the basis of personal characteristics. Wage gaps in platform work have also been recorded, with men and women in the global North and South differently placed. These concerns are yet to be addressed by policy makers, despite existing national laws and international frameworks that can arguably provide some degree of protection. However, existing literature rarely discusses broader dimensions of policymaking designed for women workers, including within the gig economy. We argue that frameworks around critical gender-responsive policy are very rarely brought into conversation with the context of the gig economy; where discussions around employment protections dominate. This article aims to address these gaps, and discusses crucial aspects of gender-responsive policy that are underdeveloped in the context of the gig economy.

In doing so, we focus on examples of existing policy frameworks or protections that can be extended to gig work rather than treating it as a sector that necessarily requires new forms of regulation. We discuss these at the level of policy rather than assess their implementation, highlighting them as ‘best practices’ even when implementation might leave room for improvement. Similar gaps also exist in broader aspects of policy such as migration regimes, employment generation, and climate adaptation, which also impact gig workers as a segment of informal workers. While these are outside the scope of this article, these are crucial areas to bring into discussion with policy frameworks governing gig work.

In the following sections, we discuss three fairly distinct areas of policymaking and law that impact women gig workers but are rarely discussed with a gender lens in the platform economy. Rather than present a comprehensive analysis of any of these, we present them to make the argument that such dimensions must also receive policy attention for the gig economy. We first discuss issues of digital access and infrastructure which constrain access to gig work, and examples of policy responses that aim to address this gap. Here we highlight projects and interventions that aim to increase access to infrastructure and skills for women workers and entrepreneurs. We then move onto anti-discrimination and equal pay law, in which we highlight more systemic protections being extended to workers in the informal economy. Finally, we discuss social protection policy as an area that is often discussed for gig workers but highlight practices that are needed to make it more gender-responsive.

Constraints On Accessing Opportunities In The Platform Economy

Job roles in the platform economy are distributed in similar patterns as the traditional economy, with a high number of women in jobs such as beauticians, domestic workers, call centre executives, etc. Heavily masculinised sectors range from ‘high-skill’ work including those in the STEM fields, as well as ‘low-skill’ jobs in location-based work such as driving and delivery work. In microtasking and freelance jobs which include work such as data labelling, content moderation, and digital freelancing, only one in three workers are women. In addition to horizontal segregation along job roles and sectors, there is also emerging evidence of vertical segregation with women workers in low-paying low-end tasks, while managerial positions are dominated by men.

A fundamental constraint to women’s access to income generating opportunities in the platform economy is the digital gender gap, which persists across the global South. Women are 12 percent less likely to be connected to the internet than men, with much higher gaps in countries with poor connectivity. There is also a gender gap in use of the internet, with women much less likely to have the skills and awareness to use mobile phones to find better economic opportunities as compared to men. The digital gender gap also implies that women-led enterprises, which are often small to medium sized, are unable to leverage opportunities to use digital tools. In India for instance, where most women workers are concentrated in home-based small enterprises, 68 percent of small business are fully offline.

These gaps have been attributed to a range of interconnected social, economic, and cultural factors. These include gender norms that restrict and police women’s access to mobile phones and digital spaces, unequal allocation of household income, and shared devices across the household. These factors then correlate with other structural forms of inequality around women’s access to education and therefore digital literacy, and paid work outside the home.

After nearly a decade of mobilisation around the digital gender gap at global fora, international organisations and national governments have come together to initiate several programmes to boost digital access and skills among women, and increase gender parity in the STEM fields. The EQUALS initiative is a leading example, bringing together a coalition of international actors to make progress in these areas through national-level commitments and knowledge-building. Similarly, APEC members have launched the APEC Women in STEM Principles and Actions, which aim to encourage women’s participation in these fields. Governments have focused on skilling and training programmes (Argentina and Nigeria), infrastructure development (South Africa), mentoring (China) and scholarships (South Korea). Some governments such as South Korea, Argentina and Mexico have also introduced legislation and policy on bridging the digital gender gap and promoting access to and use of public internet infrastructure by women.

Integrated, multi-pronged strategies show promise. South Korea’s combination of scholarships and legislation suggests a recognition that financial support must be coupled with systemic policy change. The EQUALS and APEC models help create accountability frameworks and knowledge sharing across borders. Success is also enabled by context-specific, sector-wide interventions that go beyond training. For instance, South Africa’s focus on infrastructure and China’s on mentoring acknowledge that barriers are not just about skills but also about access and support networks. The condition for success, therefore, is moving beyond isolated “skilling” programmes to holistic strategies that simultaneously address infrastructure, policy, mentorship, and economic reality.

However, despite substantial progress in specific dimensions, most countries have overall adopted a gender-blind approach in promoting digital infrastructure. Further, growing job roles in the platform economy outside of STEM fields, such as agricultural use of technologies or small manufacturing, have not received adequate attention in skilling in training programmes. These sectors are already feminized and have more women workers who could benefit from such programmes. We argue that effective interventions must be gender-intentional, legally underpinned, and responsive to the actual sectors where women work, rather than adhering to a narrow, traditional view of STEM.

Supporting women’s enterprises can also be an effective way of ensuring women’s transition into the digital economy, offering a pathway to creating better conditions of work than exploitative platforms. Preferential procurement for government tenders has worked well to ensure that women-led enterprises are being incentivised and supported, as public procurement forms a large part of the economy in most countries. For instance, the Kenyan government introduced rules to ensure that 30 percent procurement is awarded to women, youth or people with disabilities. Publicly owned digital marketplaces can be developed to provide alternatives to exploitative large corporations, along with capacity building in digital procurement. For instance, the ChileCompra, a public agency under Chile’s Ministry of Finance, substantially increased the participation of women-led small enterprises in their e-procurement system through gender-sensitive policies, including training to increase familiarity with the system. Some countries such as Indonesia have also introduced strategies for financial inclusion through digital services for women-led enterprises, although the effects of micro-finance on achieving economic empowerment are arguably very limited. The challenge with most of these interventions is that they remain piecemeal, one-off or small-scale, lowering their efficacy in combating the general conditions of exploitation within the ecommerce industry. Moving on from such interventions, the following section discusses more systemic protections that can be extended to all platform workers: anti-discrimination law. We argue that even though rarely discussed in the context of the gig economy, this is a crucial area of intervention to protect women gig workers.

Beyond Access: Anti-Discrimination And Equal Pay For Equal Work

Workers in the platform economy are vulnerable to various forms of discrimination, indirect and direct. Manifestations of indirect discrimination include occupational segregation, which also constrains women’s employment opportunities in the traditional economy. Direct forms of discrimination partly result from the reliance of platforms on algorithmic management, which tends to hard-code gender norms through algorithms that rely on past patterns, while also refusing to pay attention to gender inequalities such as care burdens. This happens primarily through gender bias in training datasets, gender aspects of data being excluded in data labelling, and other gender-blind design practices. Conversely, any marketplace platforms that match workers and employers allow employers to filter workers by demographic characteristics, including gender, religion, and age. In another example, rating systems that determine incentive structures for platform workers have also been found to be discriminatory, with customers rating workers from marginalised groups poorly.

There is also evidence of a wage gap in platform work, with women earning 37 percent less than men through freelance and micro-task work. Wage gaps have also been found in location-based work in several countries, including in driving and food delivery. The pay gap could result from several factors — women shoulder a higher burden of unpaid care work and are thus unable to put in longer hours, have more constraints around their time and shifts they might be able to work, particularly around nightshifts and undervalue their own labour and therefore quote lower wages. All of these practices are heavily penalised in the gig economy as workers spend unpaid time looking for work. Biases in rating systems can also impact incentives offered to workers. These cumulatively lower wages for workers making it difficult to disentangle any of them as evidence of direct discrimination, but indicate a structural position of disadvantage for women. However, anti-discrimination law would ameliorate some of these effects – first, by opening up closely guarded datasets for state or public scrutiny; second, by helping disentangle these facets that impact wages.

While most countries have enacted anti-discrimination laws in some form, they only tend to cover workers in employment relationships across public and private sectors. Some jurisdictions such as South Africa have amended their law to protect part-time workers who have been employed for more than three months. However, platform workers’ status as independent contractors rather than workers makes claims of discrimination more difficult. Anti-discrimination frameworks need to be urgently reimagined to include algorithmic discrimination at the workplace within their scope. This can be done by instituting public audits of datasets, making the collection of gender disaggregated data mandatory, and using positive discrimination to account for women’s lived experiences of care work rather than gender-blind platform design.

A first step forward in addressing the wage gap is enacting laws that mandate equal pay for equal work, which only exist in less than half of the economies globally. In most jurisdictions equal pay laws are also tied to employment relations. Brazil presents an expansive legal framework for workers in the informal economy by including fixed-term workers and independent contractors through a broad definition of employee. Further, regulators emphasize factual relationships rather than employment documents, which prevents disguised employees (such as platform workers) from being excluded. While gig workers in Brazil have not yet brought a claim against platforms, it would be possible for them to do so because of inclusive provisions for informal economy workers. However, while the legal framework itself offers robust protections, its enforcement mechanisms are designed primarily for the formal sector, reliant on registered employment contracts and traditional labour inspection. While some of these factors may be actionable through legislation, including placing obligations on companies to protect workers from biased ratings and remove filtering systems, others such as occupational segregation are difficult to address through law.

Further, the opacity of algorithms that determine incentive structures and rating systems have made it more difficult to prove discrimination, as platforms do not allow independent audits to assess discrimination or manipulation. Data rights of women workers need to urgently be protected to allow them to demand this data from platforms and hold them accountable.

Data rights must recognize how data collection and algorithmic management differently impact women based on race, class, and caregiving roles, ensuring protections address compounded vulnerabilities. Women gig workers must be central stakeholders in designing platforms, co-creating data governance policies, and defining what constitutes fair and transparent algorithmic oversight. This counters the current “hard objectivity” myth of AI, which often hardcodes bias in pay, task allocation, and deactivation decisions. This can be done by platforms and regulators actively auditing power differentials, questioning whose data is valued and whose labour is rendered invisible in datasets.

The following section looks at similar sources of structural constraints and how they impact another crucial area of policymaking: social protections for women gig workers.

Social Protection

Employment status has, for long, been the centrepiece of the design and governance of social protection instruments across the world. Predominantly, social protection — in the form of social insurance programs — has been made available to those engaged in formal employment. These are financed through contributions from employers and employees. The standard employment arrangements that receive legal sanction are typically characterised by full-time, formal and continuous employment.

This normative positioning of the standard employment relationship as a prerequisite for social protection is gender-blind, not cognizant of gendered labour market realities and exclusionary to women. These are compounded in the gig economy as workers are rarely recognised as employees despite all aspects of employment being controlled by platforms, even as they are difficult to regulate at national levels. Women across the world, and in global south contexts particularly, tend to have far lower access to labour markets than men do. Low rates of women’s participation in labour markets is pervasive across global south countries, and women’s employment is characterised by informality and precarity. This involves part-time arrangements, volatile and low earnings and frequent breaks in employment. Among other things, gendered social norms and expectations about men and women’s responsibilities and the disproportionately high burden of unpaid care work on women make this normative positioning of employment exclusionary to women, severely impacting their access to standard employment linked social protection instruments. These challenges present themselves for women in the informal economy equally.

It is in this context that digital platforms have emerged as a key labour market intermediary in informal markets of the South. A key feature of the platform economy is that it blurs the lines “between fully employed and casual labour, between independent and dependent employment, between work and leisure”. Leveraging the abstraction of the technological platform, advocacy campaigns and technical contract forms, platforms’ “innovation” lies in reshaping existing forms of work arrangements in ways that avoid the responsibilities of employment. This is an integral feature of platforms’ unsustainable business models, and this misclassification of work(ers) provides platforms the legal comfort to further disempower workers.

The platform economy replicates existing challenges to provisioning social security for women, as they are largely excluded due to constraints around digital access and skills. It also continues the trend of contractualisation of work and growth of the informal economy, with little protections by way of safety nets. Women are also excluded from key protections such as maternity leave and prohibition of sexual harassment at the workplace, which have been hard-won gains in many jurisdictions. They are then left open to exploitation and discrimination in what have been labelled “digital sweatshops”. Further, the absence of parental leave could result in higher burdens of care being placed on women workers.

For social protection to extend to workers beyond the formal sector, some historical and emergent models hold the potential to be effective interventions. Southern countries have a long and continuing history of large parts of the workforce in informalised work arrangements. Some examples of social security protection for workers have emerged. For example, in India, welfare boards have been mandated at the state-level to look into various matters pertaining to construction sector workers’ (which are predominantly subcontracted, casualised and migrant workers), health and social protection. The welfare boards are funded by contributions to the state coffers pegged to the total value of construction projects. The recently enforced Code on Social Security in India proposes a similar welfare board, which is now moving into implementation. Their efficacy and responsiveness to the needs of platform workers, as well as representation of platform workers’ unions, remains to be seen. Northern countries, such as Germany and France, too have occupation specific social insurance funds that require contributions from the contracting employer, government and the employers.

Policy intervention needn’t necessarily be top-down. Workers organisations, formal and informal, can play a crucial role as intermediaries between individual workers, platform companies and bodies responsible for the discharge of social protection programs. This is particularly relevant in the case of the fissured workplace that platform work operates in, and the resulting atomisation of workers, as demonstrated by the subsequent waves of labour movements led by platform workers globally. In South America, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Dominican Republic have led the way by creating a policy environment that facilitates bodies of self-employed workers to collectively participate in social security implementation from registration through distribution. While self-employed workers have struggled to collectivise due to competition law challenges in the global north – especially in countries with strict competition frameworks – countries are beginning to carve out exceptions for self-employed work that resembles employment.

We argue that the global reliance on formal employment as the gateway to social protection is a structurally obsolete and deeply gendered model, ill-suited to the realities of both the informal and platform economies. It systematically excludes women, whose labour market participation is often informal, precarious, and shaped by care responsibilities. While digital platforms have innovated in evading employer responsibilities, they have merely replicated and intensified these historical exclusions. The path forward requires a fundamental reimagining of social protection, detaching it from traditional employment status. As emerging models — from state-level welfare boards in India to collective bargaining frameworks in South America — demonstrate, effective solutions must be inclusive, innovative, and shaped with the active participation of the workers they aim to protect. The future of social justice in a digitizing world depends on building systems that recognize the dignity and rights of all workers, regardless of their contract type.

Conclusions

The broad objectives of this paper are to map the landscape of policy and legislation that impacts women’s work in the platform economy, with a particular focus on the global South, and identify areas where policy frameworks are absent or need to be strengthened. We highlight best practices in southern countries with the aim to promote adoption of well-designed law and policies and also discuss the need to adapt these to the platform economy.

We find three types of policy frameworks: (i) policy frameworks addressing the digital gender gap that have already been implemented and provide examples of good practices; (ii) policy and legal frameworks that aim to address the concerns of women workers in the traditional economy and can be utilised or extended to address emerging issues; and (iii) policy frameworks regulating work in the gig economy that impact women workers. Through this analysis, we identify gaps and ways forward for protecting marginalised workers.

We find that the platform economy replicates several barriers and challenges for women workers as the traditional economy, which deflates early enthusiasm of the potential of the former to be beneficial for women workers from marginalised communities. It also poses several novel challenges as digital systems mediate the organisation of labour, with more opaque systems designed to standardise and automate service provision.

Future research needs to focus on emerging frontiers for regulation, law and policy to advance women’s workers’ rights, including data rights and collective bargaining. Data rights, such as the right to be forgotten, data portability across platforms, and independent audits of algorithms determining ratings and incentives, could empower workers to exercise control over their data and by extension, conditions of work. Workers collectives in sectors such as transportation and logistics have been emerging with the potential to bring greater protections but have not yet been granted official recognition in most jurisdictions. Further, cooperativism and publicly owned platforms offer alternatives to corporate models but remain constrained in scale and resourcing. Future research can also study the implementation of the policy frameworks in various areas of regulation, with the aim to identify on-ground challenges faced by platform workers.