Reimagining the Gig Worker: Gender, Platforms and the Future of Livelihoods

Platform-mediated gig work and side-hustles are often understood through the figure of the Uber driver, delivery rider or entrepreneurial hustler. This “Uberization” of gig-work research has generated important insights into precarity and algorithmic control, but it has also narrowed the sociological imagination. It has obscured feminised, home-based, care-related, creative, microwork, freelance and self-priced forms of platform labour, and has left underexamined how gender, care, households, clients and platform systems interact to shape workers’ lives. This session will advance a more nuanced and future-facing sociology of platformed livelihoods. Rather than asking simply whether gig work empowers or exploits women, it asks how, when and for whom platform-mediated work reorganises inequality. We invite papers that examine platform work and side-hustles as gendered labour arrangements shaped by conditional inclusion, algorithmic visibility and valuation, client power, embodied risk, social reproduction, boundary work, unpaid availability and collective organising. We welcome empirical, theoretical, methodological and policy-oriented contributions from diverse national, regional and platform contexts. Possible themes include gendered pathways into platform work; platform and task segregation; self-pricing and valuation; care, household bargaining and work-life boundaries; ratings, reputation and algorithmic management; safety, harassment and client power; migration, class, sexuality, disability and racialisation; platform-type differences; social protection; unionisation and informal solidarity; and gender-responsive regulation. The session aims to move beyond the dominant gig-worker archetype and develop richer sociological accounts of how platform-mediated labour is reshaping the future of work, care, risk and inequality.