Women, work, and the digital economy

Abstract

Digital technologies are bringing about a transformation in the world of work at a rapid pace. Today, digitalisation has penetrated almost all major sectors of the economy (ILO 2021). Digital labour encompasses a wide range of occupations, from software developers and programmers to domestic workers on digital labour platforms, to market vendors and microentrepreneurs who use digital tools to reach customers. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the process of digitalisation, as work and livelihoods shifted online. Yet it also exposed and exacerbated inequalities between the global North and South, and along the lines of gender, race, caste, and class. Limited access to digital infrastructure, low digital literacy, and repressive sociocultural norms are some of the common reasons cited for this digital divide. Across the global South, governments have embraced digitalisation with the hope that it will increase productivity and competitiveness and generate jobs. The latter is particularly important given the high and rising unemployment, amidst an ongoing process of deagrarianisation and deindustrialisation. Whereas the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s effectively reduced public investment in technological innovation, cutting much of the global South out of the dot-com boom, this new wave of digitalisation seemingly offers an opportunity to make up for the lost decades of neoliberalism. Indeed, digitalisation has been widely promoted by international development agencies as a policy pathway towards sustainable, inclusive, and equitable economic growth, with the ‘potential to improve social and economic outcomes for women (UN Women 2020, 1). However, Huws (2014) argues that digital innovation has facilitated the concentration of capital across industries and geographies, increasing their monopoly power, in a context where states’ regulatory capacity already hangs in the balance. As surplus value is increasingly derived from value extraction rather than commodity production, workers’ bargaining power has been severely undermined. Over the past decade, platform work has attracted significant interest from scholars in advanced economies of the global North, and it is now gaining attention from scholars in the global South. Much of the contemporary debate emphasises the misclassification of platform workers, lack of state regulation, and challenges in organising workers on digital labour platforms. The focus of the literature has generally been on male-dominated