Online platforms are allowing us to trade used goods more easily than before. Similarly, sites like UpWork and Uber are making it easier to trade small blocks of human labor. Since the gig economy is growing (as documented by Dimitri Koustas), it’s important to understand how it is affecting workers.
Liya Palagashvili of Mercatus has a working paper with Paoula Suarez “Women as Independent Workers in the Gig Economy” examining particularly how the growing opportunities to work on a gig basis has affected women in different ways than men. They note, for example, that (in 2014–2015) 87 percent of independent workers on the Etsy platform were female, while 14 percent of workers on Uber’s platform were female.
Abstract: New technologies and digital platforms have ushered in a rise of gig, freelance, contract, and other types of independent work. Although independent workers and the gig economy as a whole have received plenty of attention, little research has examined the heterogeneity of work characteristics among different independent work opportunities, specifically as it relates to the participation of women in this workforce. Existing data indicate that some digital platforms are more male dominated, whereas others are more female dominated. What accounts for these differences? In this paper, we empirically examine the heterogeneity of work within independent work opportunities in relation to female participation by analyzing work characteristics in the United States from the Occupational Information Network (O*Net) database that reflect greater temporal flexibility, which has been shown to vary across occupations and to attract more female workers. Our findings suggest that women in the independent work context do self-select into the types of independent work jobs that reflect greater temporal flexibility, as is the case for women working in traditional employment. However, our findings also reveal that the way in which the existing literature measures temporal flexibility in traditional work settings may not be the same as the way it is measured in the context of independent work. We discuss the implications of our findings for public policy and labor laws. (emphasis mine)
Economist Writing Every Day 