Open Collections

Vijayakumar Nair, Amrita

University of British Columbia

In India, despite accelerating economic growth and rising per capita income, women’s participation in paid work has been markedly low. At the same time, the rise of the digital economy and the proliferation of digital platform firms have led to platform work being touted as a solution to this gender gap due to its promises of spatial and temporal flexibility and autonomy. My project critically examines these narratives through the study of gig workers and home chefs in the platform economy of Bangalore. Using a relational comparison approach based on interviews, ethnographic observation, and critical discourse analysis, I ask: (1) What are the motivations for women to participate in the Indian platform economy? How are they related to the extant conditions of social reproduction and to women’s socioeconomic positionalities? (2) What are the avenues for resistance and agency that are provided or prevented by platforms and platform-mediated work? I begin my exploration by drawing parallels between the self-correcting visions of the labour market within the Feminisation U hypothesis and the technosolutionist prescriptive of platform labour, to argue against discourses on women’s work that consider women merely as inputs into well-oiled labour markets. I then analyse the workflows and experiences of platform workers to posit that paying attention to the spatiality and temporality of women’s socially reproductive work on platforms reveals them as sites where the divisions of caste, class, and gender are reproduced, reinforced, and facilitated. Paying particular attention to women workers’ care contributions during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, I argue that belying their promises of flexible work, platforms are rendering women as flexible workers and as a reserve army of labour. Additionally, I find that through algorithmic control and surveillance, platforms are depriving gig workers even of forms of subaltern and everyday resistance. On the other hand, home chefs, due to their socioeconomic privileges are able to instrumentalise platforms to find avenues for agency and resistance through platform work. Based on these findings, I argue for reimagined solutions to the gender gap in paid work that centre women, and for platform configurations that prioritise people over profits.

Text

2024-08-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88876

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/