User:Chasemwh/Digital labor

Gender Inequality
Female platform work is more prevalent in countries that have lower female participation rates or in areas in which women tend to be more prevalent in non-standard types of employment and lower-wage jobs. The platform economy provides employment opportunities for disadvantaged groups who lack better options in their area. Platform economies can reproduce inequalities that are present in offline work such as lower earnings and occupational segregation. Women tend to be centered around digital roles that conform to patterns in the traditional labor market and economy such as freelancing and on-location services provided by care work platforms. The participation of women in digital work platforms tends to be more concentered on traditionally female gender rolled tasks. A technical report by the European Commission found that females are less likely to perform creative tasks, micro-tasking, transportation, and software development when compared to men when performing digital labor.

Over the last two decades, there has been a steady decline in the gender-based wage gap in the United Kingdom largely caused by strict national labor relation anti-discrimination legislation. However, there still exist many challenges such as low labor force participation, gender wage gaps, occupational segregation, and a postgraduate educational gap.

In the UK and most of Europe, many women find digital labor employment through remote crowd-work platforms (also known as part of the "Gig-economy") like Upwork, TaskRabbit, etc. The switch from the traditional labor market to platform labor has not extinguished the gender bias in traditional employment but rather bought new sets of challenges. The hiring process used in digital labor platforms are executed by machine learning algorithms which learn from past data patterns and are showing discriminatory outcomes based around gender. An interview conducted with 49 women was carried out to figure out the gender dimensions of these digital platforms and multiple complaints based around gender bias were reported as customer feedback.

The African Union has a vision to empower women through Information and communication technologies (ICTs). They also declared 2010 to 2020 as the African Women's Decade. It is found that there are several gender inequalities due to education, socioeconomic status, domesticity, and traditionalism which creates disparity in the ICT access and usage. It further widens the digital gender divide between men's and women's representation in the digital labor market. Women in Africa were hopeful that new digital technologies or digitized work would bring equal pay and working opportunities, but in reality, they are facing new gender-based inequalities like economic insecurities, high work intensity, and adverse psychological impacts among women workers on such platforms.