A ‘working lives’ approach to platform work: accounting for informality, social reproduction, and gender norms

Building on recent interventions in platform work scholarship that centre social reproduction and draw attention to informal economies in the Global South, this paper advances a ‘working lives’ framework to account for the entanglements of production/reproduction, informality and precarity, and gender norms in the shaping of platform work. Based on interviews with women engaged in delivery work through digital platforms in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Delhi, India, the paper shows that women enter platform delivery work compelled by adverse socio-economic conditions and work-life histories of informality. Women organise their participation in platform delivery work, making use of its location flexibility, for and around the needs of the household. Further, they operationalise this flexibility to navigate gendered constraints, such as, curtailed radius of work to ensure safety and continued responsibility for housework and childcare. The paper, empirically novel in accounting for narratives of women in the Global South, offers the analytical framework of ‘working lives’, combining long-term and place-based perspectives with everyday perspectives, with attention to social norms, for research on platform work globally.