Don’t blame the internet: it has little to do with gender inequality in crowd work

Introduction

Before Covid-19, an emerging body of research had questioned whether digital technologies and the platform economy might promote the empowerment of women, only to arrive at either positive (Elance, 2013; OECD, 2018) or negative conclusions (Martinez Dy et al., 2018). Studies have frequently focused on the ability of digital solutions to mediate simple tasks and so lead to more jobs for women (Eurofound, 2019), whilst few examined the careers of women crowdworkers whose digital literacy and educational attainment were identical to or higher than those of men. Research that did look at careers in the digital and online world often prised them offering flexible working hours that catered to women juggling professional obligations with domestic chores (Hyperwallet, 2020), but questioned the neutrality of the internet in terms of reproducing offline inequality in the online environment (Martines Dy, et al., 2018; Galperin, 2019).

Puzzled by this dilemma, the research team of the Public Policy Research Center (CENTAR) approached this multifaceted issue by examining the careers of Serbian female crowdworkers on global online platforms such as Freelancer, Guru, Upwork and alike, and compared them with those of their male colleagues. We felt that Serbia offered an excellent opportunity for this kind of examination. Firstly, for a number of years, the country has been highlighted as one of the largest per capita contributors of digital platform workers/freelancers in relation to the active workforce (Kässi & Lehdonvirta, 2020; AnalyticsHelp, 2018; Payoneer, 2019; Kuek, et. al., 2015). Furthermore, as research done by CENTAR and others has pointed out, women accounted for a significant share of this population, their participation varying from 32 to 40 percent. Although women participation at platforms is lower than that of men, some countries stand out with higher than average percentage of female freelancers: Philippines with 62 %, United States with 47 %, Serbia 34%, Argentina 30%, Ukraine 30%. (Payoneer, 2020). CENTAR’s Gigmetar confirms these findings, with the percentage of female crowdworkers ranging from 31.4 % to 37.6 % depending on when the data were collected (Andjelkovic et al., 2020a; Andjelkovic, et al., 2020 b). Gigmetaris CENTAR’s monitoring instrument that generates data about the pay of Serbian female and male crowdworkers and their in-country regional dispersion and professional affiliation, based on the OLI classification of occupations (Kässi, 2016).

Quest into the digital gender divide: the beginning of the journey

CENTAR’s research team began its investigation in late 2018 by first approaching the digital gender divide from the perspective of digital entrepreneurship. As this does not require one’s own start-up capital and assets, social networks, and social contacts, which have to date been associated mainly with the business world of successful men, we wanted to see if men and women with identical or very similar starting positions and educational attainment had the same prospects in the online world, on global online platforms such as Freelancer, Guru, and the like.

To our surprise, the findings, which we presented in October 2019 (Andjelkovic et al., 2019), revealed men and women scored equally in key dimensions intrinsic to entrepreneurship. They showed the same levels of motivation and initiative for working on online platforms, desire for personal growth and skills development, and features of entrepreneurial spirit, such as risk-taking and proactiveness. On the other hand, the study also found differences in earnings: men dominated high-income sectors, such as the creative industry and software development and technology. By contrast, women were over-represented in clerical and data entry services and writing and translation, all of these being less well-paid online jobs. However, the visible gender pay gap did not correlate with entrepreneurial characteristics. Our female digital entrepreneurs were not entrepreneurs out of necessity, as in the offline world (Babovic, 2012), but, rather, out of opportunity. Moreover, the findings suggested that remote work via online platforms had the potential to offer women financial freedom and an improved work/life balance when compared to a traditional career, leading to the conclusion that the future of gig work might be female. In other words, it seemed as if the internet was not reproducing offline inequality.

Coincidence or the rule?

Yet, we asked ourselves whether this was only a short-lived departure, substantiated only by anecdotal evidence, from an otherwise opposite path. To verify the findings, we used a different approach and data sets from Upwork compiled through Gigmetar^TM, CENTAR’s monitoring instrument.

Over a period of 10 months (from December 2019 to October 2020), Gigmetar^TM confirmed women’s dominance in less well-paid occupations, corroborating the previously identified pay gap. Even though women accounted for around 40 percent of the workforce, their share of income consistently hovered at around 35 percent (Andjelkovic et al., 2020b). The pay difference had even increased: hourly rates demanded by women were lower by 23.6 percent to those quoted by men in October 2020 compared to December 2019 (Andjelkovic et al., 2020b; Andjelkovic et al., 2019). Indeed, the pandemic seems to have largely halted the convergence of male and female incomes observed in pre-Covid-19 times in Serbia and globally (Payoneer, 2020). These results have raised the issue of the potential dividend of remote work on online platforms when viewed from a gender perspective in the Serbian context. Was this a sign that the internet was, after all, generating a gender divide and reproducing offline inequality?

Survival on online platforms: the absence of fixed gender

To delve deeper into gender dimensions of online gig work and more closely examine whether women had the same prospects on global online platforms, we decided to run additional tests and compare survival rates over time of both men and women in the six occupations in which they operated. ‘Survival’ here refers to remaining in one’s originally declared category of work. If the respondent dropped out of the sample, or in any way changed their original occupation, he or she were considered not to have ’survived’. The loss of initial information about the respondent’s occupation was therefore taken to be a ‘critical event’. The analysis encompassed more than 2,000 individuals, both men and women, in the six categories over the 10 months from December 2019 to October 2020.

The analysis proved that men and women had almost the same survival rates in the reporting period. The only marginally significant difference was seen in sales and marketing support, where men fared somewhat better than women. In general, the likelihood of survival was identical for men and women, in contrast to reported findings that indicate women dropped out of platform work twice as quickly as men (Farrell and Greig, 2016, Balaram et al., 2017).

Based on the above considerations, we argue that, in Serbia, gender inequality in remote work on global online platforms was chiefly driven by women’s skill sets and the occupations they populated, whilst the probability of survival was the same for women and men across the various occupations.

Gender inequality was embedded in the fact that women were significantly less present in occupations that were better paid and in greater demand. This had been the case before Covid-19, and the pandemic has only accelerated this trend owing to the surge in ‘male’ occupations.

In order words, our survival analysis showed women working on global online platforms were as successful as men. Their previous choices in selecting offline professions that tended to be less well-paid determined only their financial success on the platforms.

This may corroborate the view that, even when the gender of crowdworker is unknown and platforms match employers with workers solely based on price (Adams-Prassl & Berg, 2017), they are still unable to eliminate the pay gap stemming from selection of occupations. This again may lead us to the conclusion that the internet is not a generator of the gender divide but nevertheless cannot avoid reproducing offline gender inequality.