‘Women in Gig Work: Web-Based Work,’ WageIndicator’s sixth webinar on platform economy, started with Janna Besamusca’s keynote speech on reasons why women, especially mothers, choose to move from the offline labor world to digital platforms.
Then three panelists discussed digital labor work's good and bad sides during the debate session.
Afterwards, it was time to show the best practices among women and web-based work. Platform expert and member of WageIndicator Gig Team Martijn Arets presented two relevant initiatives.
EFFICIENCY OR FAIRNESS?
The first best practice is the German 'Crowdsourcing Code,' a code of conduct between 8 German crowd work platforms on improving workers' conditions.
The initiator of the Crowdsourcing Code, Markus Steinhauser, COO of crowd work platform Testbirds, could not join the webinar. Yet, Martijn Arets interviewed him for the first episode of The Gig Work Podcast, the new podcast WageIndicator launched last week.
If you want to receive alerts for our podcast's future episodes, please sign up for the WageIndicator's Gig Work newsletter, or subscribe to the podcast, at Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, and Pocket Casts. The podcast will be available for Apple and Google soon! The interview’s highlights can also be found in a blog.
The second best practice is the proof that ‘if you want to design a platform both for efficiency and fairness, you can do that,’ Arets underlined. ‘You can redesign matching processes to avoid discrimination and bias and put the worker's skills first.’
SkillsCV is an online tech solution that makes anonymous matching possible. As the Product Owner of SkillsCV, Adinda Alvares explained, ‘We regard people’s education and working experience with a look at what they're made of and combine that with an anonymous matching. This way, hiring managers will look only at your skills: no photos, names, gender, age, or nationality. We can have a fair match for both.’
SkillsCV translates education, working experience, and hobbies into skills. Based on this, they create a user profile workers can use to apply for a job.
‘We want to reduce the possible discrimination that can occur based on race or gender. Organizations should only think: hey, this is an interesting profile. Users can decide whether to share their data because they are the data owners.
SkillsCV was born only six months ago but has obtained many positive results: its matching process translates users’ experience into specific skills, giving people a greater validation of them. Secondly, it gives job seekers a wider look at their capabilities, boosting their confidence. And thirdly, Adinda reported that ‘organizations want to start thinking differently about how they do recruitment: a lot of potential is not used right now because workers and companies are not aware of it. And don’t forget that we, as workers, have more power than we think.’
WOMEN IN GIG WORK: WEB-BASED WORK - CONCLUSIONS
- When we think about new types of work, we should also consider where we start from: the traditional offline labor market. Inequalities we find there are often replicated online since the bias and prejudices are the same. We’ve heard for years that women apply less frequently than men for paid work, and if they do, they work fewer hours due to their care responsibilities. So they are paid less.
- Considering the issues women face in the offline labor market, it is indisputable that digital platforms offer many opportunities to them. Nonetheless, we need to consider the risks that come with finding opportunities.
- Not all women have the same experiences in the gig economy. That’s why we need more data in quantitative and qualitative terms on women working on digital labor platforms. Only once we have that data, we can start understanding what kinds of platforms work for women and what types of platforms don't.
- There is an urgent need for more transparency about how these platforms are designed, and how the algorithms are set up, because algorithms can be very biased. Technology is not neutral, and it's not gender-neutral. Women can be getting engaged in this design process and also in the policy process. The debate is not entirely male-dominated.
- The asymmetry of power we often find in the platform economy is connected to information asymmetry. The information that workers have and clients' information at the start of that working relationship can represent a significant change in the design to make it more symmetrical.
Read also:
- Women in Gig Work: Web-Based Work Keynote Speech: What it is like being a woman and freelancer on digital platforms
- Women in Gig Work: Web-Based Work Panel Discussion: The good and bad sides of digital platforms jobs
The WageIndicator Gig Team has scheduled the next webinar on October 27, 2023 ‘A Level Playing Field for Gig Workers’ will focus on the solutions to create equality for platform workers, through collective bargaining, fair representation, and more.