Hi, my name is Ira Anjali Anwar.
And today, I'll be presenting our paper
on women workers' experience of control
on location-based home service platforms in Bangalore, India.
Control mechanisms are critical in configuring employment
relations, particularly in the gig work context
where the employment status of workers
remains widely contested.
However, studies and platform control
largely look at male dominated occupations,
such as ridesharing and delivery work.
Women workers in India are subject to various forms
of socio-cultural control from their immediate family,
the local community, as well as state
and other formal institutions, such as universities,
factories, and so forth.
These relations are shaped by patriarchal, caste, and class
structures unique to India.
Given this context, our study examines
how women working on location-based platforms
in India identify and negotiate both explicit and implicit
forms of control.
We recruited 19 beauticians on the two main home service
platforms in Bangalore to conduct our research
by booking their services through the apps
and had in-depth interviews ranging between 40 minutes
to 2 hours.
To analyze the data, we used both open as well as
provisional coding.
We adopted Kellogg's dreamwork to organize our findings
on platform control mechanisms, which broadly
fall under two buckets--
algorithmic, as well as non-algorithmic forms
of control.
Algorithmic control can be further divided
into the six Rs, as you can see on the slide.
So this would be an example of algorithmic
recommending and restricting.
This would be an example of algorithmic recording
and rating.
And finally, this would be an example of algorithmic
rewarding and replacing.
While the work platforms predominately
exercise algorithmic control mechanisms,
we found that they also deployed non-algorithmic means,
such as bureaucratic evaluation through human supervision.
For instance, trainers scrutinize and evaluate
work performance in their initial training, as well as
retraining periods.
Once we identified the ways in which platforms exercise
control over workers, we explored
how women gig workers experience and responded to these control
mechanisms.
We found that since women's mobility is heavily
policed by their families and community due to legitimate
as well as constructed safety concerns,
women manipulated instances of platform
control to convince their families to let
them work on the platform.
Participant 7 discusses how she emphasized
algorithmic recording functions to overcome her family's safety
concerns.
"My family was scared, so I told them, look,
there's good security here.
For starting the job and ending, they asked for an OTP,
then if something happens, if there's a problem,
there are people for us."
Similarly, workers also utilize platform control
to navigate difficult situations with customers.
Participant 17 talks about how she
relies on company policy, a form of bureaucratic evaluation,
to ward off unwanted male customers.
"I made him understand company policy.
Until we talk to the woman client,
we're not supposed to come to take the service.
I tried to make him understand, but still he's
requesting me, please come, please come.
And I said, no, I cannot.
Please cancel this thing."
Based on these findings, our analysis
suggests that women workers use platform control to negotiate
entrenched patriarchal, casteist,
and classist relationships within their families
and customers.
Participants actively utilize platform-enacted active control
to further their socioeconomic and physical mobility.
However, even as beauty workers exercise agency,
platform control does not structurally
challenge the socio-cultural logic that restricts
women's lives in India.
Rather, it seeks to displace traditional control
structures, such as the family, with its own control mechanism.
As participants 7's experience highlights, it is not so much
that the platform worker's movements are no longer
scrutinized, rather it is the assurance
that the platform will continue to monitor and control
her movements, which pacifies her family
and let's engage with gig work.
Similarly, opaque rating mechanisms,
alongside the shift in spatial dynamics,
work to entrench [INAUDIBLE] asymmetries between customers
and workers, invisiblizing yet reinforcing caste and class
structures.
Women's bodies and actions continue
to be governed, only now through the economic logic of gig
platforms.
Thank you so much for listening.
Do read our paper, "Watched, but Moving,
The Platformization of Beauty Work
and Its Gendered Mechanisms of Control."