Rethinking the Gig Economy’s False Promise to Women

Pakistan is celebrating record IT exports. India expects its gig labor force to triple by 2030. China has engaged 25% of the country’s labor force in gig roles, roughly 200 million workers.

Across the Global South, governments are betting on digital labor to grow their economies, yet for women, platform work is creating income without the promised independence.

Digital platforms are often marketed by institutions and governments alike as a means to enable women’s participation in previously excluded markets. This idea has bled into public perception, with many female gig workers believing in the promise of platform work to offer them greater accessibility and the opportunity for pay equal to their male counterparts.

Contrarily, these platforms are fostering quiet constraints that political stakeholders and macroeconomic experts too often overlook. This dynamic of digital access without financial empowerment has created an invisible paradox where women gain market participation but lose out on individual agency, undermining supposed advances toward financial equality.

Global governments have begun to embrace the transformative promise digital platforms hold.

In Pakistan, federal and provincial governments have provided free online training programs to transform their workforces into freelancers, boosting IT exports to a record $3.8 billion in the 2024-2025 fiscal year. Ethiopia and Bangladesh are expanding so-called phygital public infrastructure by establishing digital centers and similar financial literacy programs.

The appeal of investing in the gig economy lies in the opportunity for workers to explore new income channels outside of traditional labor markets, offering autonomy, flexibility and casting a wide net that reaches both skilled and unskilled laborers.

At first glance, this supposed selling point signals a pathway that uniquely reaches women: the means to earn funds independently while circumventing the traditional obstacles they face when entering formal labor markets.

Ostensibly, gig work enhances a woman’s control over personal circumstances. From there, proponents could point to the obvious consequence: increasing women’s economic autonomy gives stronger freedom of choice and societal participation.

This is an optimistic projection that influential predecessors of the platform economy subscribed to early on, with Uber claiming in 2016 that its business model was built for women to “take the wheel,” announcing a goal to get 1 million women drivers on the app by 2020 as their defining compliment of a job well done for women’s empowerment.

Yet, beneath this promise lie discreet structural issues.

Women working in the gig economy are primarily concentrated in traditionally feminine sectors such as beauty and caregiving, while male-dominated spaces such as ride-hailing remain unprotected, algorithmically biased and carry wage disparities.

Gig employers rarely provide formal contracts, legal employee protections or union representation — safeguards already limited within formal employment structures in developing economies. Without them, workers struggle to establish individual control.

Even as governments promote digital labor, women’s participation is limited by cultural norms and a lack of institutional support. Patriarchal norms and systemic hierarchies often foster economic abuse. In some cases, a woman’s income is not considered her own and is controlled by her partner, her earnings ironically becoming her own cage. In Palestine, for instance, economic control often involves not just the appropriation of income but restricted access to expenditures, even for basic necessities.

Gig work in its current state poses an inherent risk of reinforcing and expanding upon these patriarchal dynamics in which women are the earners on digital platforms but lack the formalized legal and institutional protections for true financial security.

Algorithmic biases reinforce these prejudices. Often, gig platforms reward constant availability, disproportionately impacting women with familial responsibilities or safety concerns.

The algorithmic design of the ride-hailing industry intrinsically sets female drivers unfavorably compared to their male counterparts. Refusing rides that may be unsafe results in the worker being punished with fewer ride offers or lower earnings. Work choices will inevitably be affected by family obligations and safety; still, these considerations are not part of platform incentives, fostering a disparity based on gender-biased metrics that skew the accuracy of collective labor contributions.

This is not a disruption of patriarchal economies, but a replication under the guise of financial inclusivity, the barriers to entry being literally built into platform models. The difference now is that this replication of structural constraints is at a risk of being masked behind the positive optics of women’s growing visibility in the workforce. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of the reality of the gig economy’s reformism that is shared even among the highly-educated, decision-makers in political regimes, let alone being made aware to the general public and laborers participating in these very platforms.

There has been little-to-no research on the gig economy’s impacts on low- and middle-income countries or on understanding women’s experiences within the space, a constraint for those in power seeking to develop effective, evidence-based policy measures. This, however, doesn’t stop decision-makers from investing, some even with good intentions of equity in mind.

Bangladesh, Malaysia and Kosovo are providing online gig work training to specifically support youth, women and those in the bottom 40% of the income distribution. Yet a case study in Bangladesh found that husbands often control the mobile banking linked to their wives’ income. Under Malaysian labor law, most platform workers are designated “independent contractors,” lacking formal employment protections such as minimum wage or bargaining rights.

Ethiopia is investing in mobile networks to expand internet access. However, a study of women’s experiences on the all-women Ethiopian ride-hailing platform Seregela found that participants reported a weak management structure that made employer-employee communication difficult and limited drivers’ ability to report safety or harassment issues.

Despite some decision-makers’ tailored intentions for inclusion, expanded labor participation without proper considerations will lead not to empowerment, but a new form of dependency.

The macroeconomic stakes are significant, yet the picture is distorted. The gig economy is not a free market where financial growth and inclusion go hand in hand. This faulty assumption is based on global institutions, policymakers and multilateral development banks utilizing rising participation and demand as one of the sole indicators for success. The World Bank, among other leading institutions, repeatedly frames gig work as opportunistic for women based on its support for increased labor market participation and its increased demand, even with a quieter admittance that there is little understanding of its impacts. Recall that Uber’s 2016 inclusivity pledge sought to have 1 million women drivers simply “take the wheel,” signaling how measurement shortcuts have a cascading level of influence impacting corporate decisions.

Platforms extract capital from women without redistributing benefits equitably, reinforcing occupational segregation and misallocating labor. If women cannot control or reinvest their earnings, national growth is undermined, a facet too often unaccounted at an institutional level. Rising female participation thereby inflates GDP superficially; without protections or agency, states are left with underutilized talent, inefficient resource allocation and cyclical underdevelopment. These inefficiencies accumulate, simultaneously diminishing widespread economic progress and resilience under the semblance of reform.

Achieving true progress requires a multi-lateral approach.

First, an acknowledgement of this paradox should be brought into institutional and scholarly dialogue, with governments recognizing the insufficiency of financial access alone and minimizing the risk of misinterpretation of the gig economy’s benefits to both decisionmakers and the general public. Regulations surrounding labor protections for platform workers, independent contractors and reasonable mechanisms for dispute resolution must be brought into platforms to address safety.

Legal mechanisms should additionally strengthen women’s access to and control over their own income. Sociocultural recognition of women’s rights to their earnings and property, even supported legally, could admittedly be a gradual process alone. However, coupling regulation with fintech solutions aimed at female-centered services, such as private digital wallets accessible only to women or tailored savings and credits products along with an expansion of capital access for women-led enterprises, could feasibly expedite sociocultural diffusion.

Platforms themselves need to take initiative by creating inclusive algorithms.

Design should incorporate gender-responsive features: algorithms that account for familial obligations, safety tools for high-risk industries and continuous design monitoring and upgrading through transparency reporting and audits. Modifications can be publicly incentivized, appealing to the platform’s business practices.

One notable example of an effective alignment of corporate ethics to development objectives is the “Gender Equity Deal,” a set of taxation, certification and incentive programs adopted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Governments can condition market access on adherence or leveled milestone progression to gender-inclusive platform standards and incentivize investors who prioritize platforms with equitable design. Public-private partnerships represent a sturdy pathway towards genuine development measures.

Without institutional support, regulatory oversight and cultural reform, the gig economy risks producing a generation of women who earn but cannot exercise control.

This is more than a social concern: it is a macroeconomic risk, undermining national growth, perpetuating inequality, and weakening state capacity in a global economy already facing an increasingly widening income distribution gap.

Simply put, the digital economy is not inherently progressive. Policymakers and private leaders must either set precedent for cultural reform or reinforce the status quo. Success upon expansion must be measured not by rising female participants, but their ability to retain agency over their financial circumstances. Only then will digital labor translate into burgeoning gig economies.