Platform Livelihoods

Women’s economic empowerment is central to gender equality.

However, work opportunities available to low-income women in

patriarchal societies are infrequent. While crowd work has the

potential to increase labor participation of such women, much

remains unknown about their engagement with crowd work and

the resultant opportunities and tensions. To fll this gap, we critically

examined the adoption and use of a crowd work platform by low-

income women in India. Through a qualitative study, we found

that women faced tremendous challenges, for example, in seeking

permission from family members to do crowd work, lack of family

support and encouragement, and often working in unfavorable

environments where they had to hide their work lives. While crowd

work took a toll on their physical and emotional wellbeing, it also

led to increased confdence, agency, and autonomy. We discuss

ways to reduce frictions and tensions in participation of low-income

women on crowd work platforms.