The gig economy encompasses a wide range of paid tasks. It exists in the digital realm and in many offline activities. The common ground lies in the nature of the link between “employer” and contractor. Usually, gig workers are independent contractors carrying out a wide variety of mostly ad hoc or short-term jobs.
A new investigation into the nature of the gig economy in the USA shows that while entry into this kind of work is equitable between men and women in terms of motivation. Both men and women hoped to earn extra income and have the freedom to choose where they work. Commonly, however, women’s expectations for the actual level of remuneration was lower than that expected by men. This was borne out in reality, the research shows, where the rates for an equivalent job are indeed lower for women.
Robert A. Peterson of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, explains that the gig economy is a heterogeneous collection of firms and individuals engaged in a wide variety of jobs. In the USA, it represents a $1.4 trillion industry and almost 57 million workers, 40 percent of the US workforce, were involved in the gig economy in 2021. The pre-pandemic rate of growth was three times faster than the growth seen in conventional employer-employee workforces, he adds.
“The present study is perhaps the most broad-based investigation of gig workers to date,” writes Peterson, “regardless of whether they obtain or execute their gigs through an online platform or website, work only for a particular company, or engage in only a specific gig.”
Fundamentally, the notion of a gig economy is entirely familiar to a previous generation who would recognise it as nothing more sophisticated than the conventional signing of contractors to do requisite tasks within a firm without them being on the employee payroll. However, the various digital platforms – including Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, DoorDash, and TaskRabbit – that have emerged in recent years have made access to contracting work much more readily available to a wider range of people. Other, traditionally non-digital, companies have also adopted digital platforms to recruit on-demand workers to carry out ad hoc tasks for them.
The relationship between gender and occupation and gender and remuneration has been researched and discussed widely across many disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, business, engineering, medicine, and even the physical sciences, adds Peterson. However, the vast majority of this research has focused on conventional employment and has not yet considered the gig economy and the existence of a putative gender gap that mirrors what has been seen repeatedly in the traditional workplace.
Peterson hopes to correct this and has undertaken a nationwide survey of more than 1000 gig workers who had taken on “gigs” in the previous year. They were contracted in the digital realm and in the offline world and those surveyed were not limited to conventional industry boundaries nor companies involved.
“Hopefully, the present research will provide insights and an initial foundation for, and stimulate, future research that seeks a theoretical understanding of a phenomenon that has major economic as well as social implications,” Peterson concludes.
Peterson, R.A. (2022) ‘Heterogeneity in the US gig economy with a focus on gender’, Int. J. Applied Decision Sciences, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.365–384.
