The gig economy has experienced significant growth in recent years, driven by a pandemic-induced demand for swift and convenient access to goods and services. This economy is dominated by the provision of assistance requested via digital platforms such as food delivery, repairs and care work (eg babysitting) provided by temporary workers termed ‘independent contractors.’ Despite its growing importance, the gig economy is characterised by variable hours, limited job security and minimal opportunities for career development.
Gig work has seen a rapid rise in the past decade in several countries, including India, driven by factors such as growing rural-to-urban migration, low entry barriers, increasingly affordable mobile phones and data plans, and growing venture capital investment in digital platforms. According to the Indian government’s policy arm, NITI Aayog, approximately 7.7 million individuals in the country were engaged in gig work in 2020. While sex disaggregated data on the gig labour force is scarce, some estimates note that women currently make up 28% of platform economy workers. Though the gig economy may seemingly promote an equal-opportunity workspace, entrenched structural barriers make it difficult for women to access quality work within this system.
Challenges Faced by Women in Gig Economy
Women in India’s gig economy face multifaceted challenges. These barriers manifest at the policy-, sociocultural- and company-levels. These factors shape the type of work women can access and the options available to negotiate their position in the workforce.
Policy-level Challenges
Most gig workers remain outside the purview of many labour laws, leaving women workers particularly vulnerable. Several labour laws were restructured in India in 2019, but only the 2020 Code on Social Security mentions and defines gig workers as individuals earning outside the traditional employer-employee relationship. Legal recognition without ‘employee-like’ status means that these workers are neither eligible for minimum wage, nor are they covered by the 2013 Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, leaving them without legal recourse. Even within the Code on Social Security, provisions for maternity benefits and childcare remain ambiguous, leaving companies with room to avoid these obligations. The complex multi-employer nature of gig work allows platforms to sidestep responsibilities, particularly regarding maternity leave and welfare benefits.
Sociocultural-level Challenges
Female gig workers, especially those providing in-home services like beauty treatments, face significant safety risks. Existing platforms often lack mechanisms to help them assess risks or ensure safe exits. Moreover, algorithm-driven systems often pressure workers to endure inappropriate client behaviour to avoid poor ratings. Company responses are either minimal or paternalistic, whereby some companies have begun advising women to avoid male customers, disallowing them to work after 6 PM, limiting their earning potential. The digital divide compounds these challenges. Only 18% of women use mobile internet compared to 30% of men. Owing to the rural-urban divide, women migrating to cities for opportunities are unfamiliar with digital payment, Global Positioning System navigation, and other systems that gig platforms require. This lack of ‘digital legibility’ along with digital illiteracy plces female workers at a disadvantage from the start.
Company-level Challenges
Gender segmentation is a defining characteristic of gig work, where women are concentrated in jobs related to beauty work, caregiving or domestic services, which are often undervalued and underpaid. Existing gender discrimination is reflected in the outcomes generated by algorithms reinforcing social inequalities or creating new forms of discriminations. For instance, a female worker in the goods delivery or a ride-hailing service platform may find fewer job matches because platforms assume these jobs are better suited for men.Algorithms also impose minimum hour requirements for ratings and job allocations, insensitive to the unpaid care work women perform at home. A study conducted by the National Sample Survey Office in 2022 highlighted that women in the working-age group of 15 to 60 years spend an average of 7.2 hours daily on unpaid domestic work compared to only 2.8 hours spent by men. Women gig workers are also vulnerable to company policies due to low bargaining power reflected in low membership in male-dominated trade unions like the United Food Delivery Partners’ Union and the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Worker Union work requires time and resources that many women, burdened by paid and domestic responsibilities, cannot spare.
Policy Options
The challenges outlined reveal a deeply entrenched cycle of gendered barriers within the Indian gig economy. Considering this, three policy options that address the complexity of these challenges can be proposed:
- Maintain the status quo: This would be beneficial for two key reasons. A low female labour force participation may be a temporary phenomenon and as countries move towards higher incomes, this status may gradually improve on its own. Additionally, the gig economy is projected to create 90 million jobs in India by 2050, providing more opportunities to women and contributing 1.25% to the country’s GDP.
- Improve Legislations: Adopting a more inclusive framework like the UK legislation, this policy option would provide more flexibility to women workers by categorising workers into three groups: self-employed, workers and employees, based on their level of contribution. This would be defined using parameters such as working hours, service provision and loyalty to one or more platforms, rather than through the restrictive definition of being “outside an employee-employer relationship.” Once defined, gig workers could then further be protected, for instance, through their inclusion in the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act as well. State governments could lead the implementation of welfare schemes such as maternity benefits, childcare facilities and POSH-related grievance redressal mechanisms by incorporating these into programmatic schemes. The enactment of these schemes and improved legislations could follow the five-pronged RAISE approach outlined by NITI Aayog, which focuses on recognising diverse work, innovative financing, balancing stakeholder interests, strengthening awareness and ensuring benefit accessibility.
- Improve Legislation Resulting in Company Accountability: Another option is for gig workers to be categorised under the ‘workers and employees’ category of the improved legislation introduced in the second policy option. Such categorisation would allow increased protections that companies can provide, including insurance, as well as legal and emergency aid, for instance as piloted by Urban Company. Women-centred platforms in India have been exemplary in their approach to gender, considering they work with and directly serve women. In platforms such as TaxShe, Sakha and Koala, gig workers rely on WhatsApp groups or informal meetings to share demands, address concerns, negotiate wages and offer social support.
Though reshaping sociocultural barriers is often difficult, addressing policy-level and company-level issues may allow women to better flourish in the gig economy and help India experience a thriving labour force. In fact, the increased participation of women in the economy directly challenges and weakens restrictive gender norms that question their role. Empowering women in this way is not only fair, but also essential for societal and economic progress.
Read the case study Gig Work, Big Gaps: Women in India’s Gig Economy by Labisha Uprety, Chaitali Pramod Pathak and Nasala Maharjan which was awarded the Merit Prize in the Case Writing Competition 2024/25 at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Access more case studies from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
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