Dowling opens the discussion by laying out four facets of a feminist perspective on platform labour. First, it places centre-stage the co-constitutive relationship between production and reproduction, that is, between workplaces and households in the global economy. Second, it brings into view the role of unwaged domestic and care work and low-wage paid services in capital accumulation. Third, it demands an analysis of intersections between gender, race, class, able-bodiedness and ecological concerns. Fourth, it attends to social conflict, change and struggle, particularly feminist struggles over shifting regimes of social reproduction. Methodologically, she argues, this lens commits researchers to a critical analysis of existing power relations and how they are rendered natural and desirable, while also asking how those relations might be transformed.

Blanchard’s research on home care platforms in Spain illustrates how this perspective reshapes the questions researchers ask. When she began studying platform labour in 2019, most academic and public debate centred on highly masculinised sectors such as ride hailing and food delivery, leaving a significant knowledge gap around cleaning and home care platforms despite Spain having one of the highest numbers of platform labourers in Europe. Gathering data on platform founders, she found they fit the typical tech start-up profile: mostly male, aged 30 to 45, with business backgrounds and no prior connection to the care sector. Men are the founders, CEOs and investors of these companies, while women make up most of the workforce, and women remain underrepresented in the tech sector at large, occupying only 19 percent of ICT positions in Europe according to Eurostat.

Blanchard also situates platform labour within the wider context of technology production. The apps are powered by algorithms and artificial intelligence systems with enormous costs in natural resources and human labour. Where AI is often portrayed as immaterial, evoked by the term the cloud, she insists we should not disregard the vast invisible human labour involved in training and developing these technologies, nor the immense dependency on water and resource extraction. A feminist perspective, drawing on the work of scholars such as Maria Mies and Silvia Federici, attends to the ways the same disregard applied to invisible reproductive labour is applied to ecological resources in capitalist economies.

Orth’s research on migration and the gig economy extends this analysis to the question of who bears the costs of platform business models. Platform companies externalise much of their running costs, from smartphones and bicycles to cleaning materials, along with employer responsibilities such as social security, onto their workers. A readily accessible and hyperflexible pool of workers is essential to platform capitalism, yet companies do not shoulder the cost of reproducing that workforce. Her contribution is to show that the cost of migration itself, the material, educational and emotional resources it requires, should be considered another form of cost externalisation by platform companies. She also asks what kind of life-world emerges in, from, through and against platform labour: who makes food for the delivery worker, and how do they balance precarious work with their own social reproduction needs?

Riemann’s work complicates the assumption that feminist research means only studying women’s work. In Belgium she uncovered many forms of unpaid labour in the care sector, linked to gendered expectations of performing care for the love of others, an ideal worker norm that undermined carers’ negotiating power. Workers who refused unpaid overtime were frequently stigmatised as immoral by supervisors and clients’ families. In Hamburg she now studies food delivery riders from a biographical perspective, sensitised to intersectional inequalities of migration status, class, ability and age. Many riders from Ghana face pressure to conform to a masculine provider role, with remittances, colloquially called the black tax by one interviewee, recurring throughout her research. The few female riders she interviewed described gendered obstacles including safety concerns, disrespect from male colleagues and heightened vulnerability in traffic, particularly at night.

Ecker’s research on the logistical city examines how delivery services for groceries and prepared meals externalise housework in Germany, and his findings on continuity are among the most striking in the conversation. Digitalised delivery services reinforce gendered inequalities within households because they displace rather than renegotiate how domestic labour might be undertaken otherwise. In grocery delivery, the work of consumption and transportation is commodified and takes place in public, while the mental load of thinking about what to order and who will eat remains privatised in the household as a feminised task. The relief the service brings is therefore asymmetrical. Dowling adds that what shifts is that the negotiation of the task becomes a logistical one, not about who does the reproductive labour but who organises the services. Ecker describes this as a logistification of housework, noting that older adults who came to rely on delivery services experienced an impoverishment of their social lives as grocery shopping was reduced to logistical provision, while in waged retail work a union representative described the residual role as an in-store logistician rather than a salesperson, with a corresponding devaluation in pay grade.

The roundtable also challenges the marketing narrative of platforms as democratising technologies. Orth found that domestic work platforms in Germany, rather than hosting the typical care worker demographic of working-class women in their fifties and sixties from central and eastern Europe, attracted multilingual young people in their twenties and thirties with university degrees. Precarious conditions that have always existed for working-class women and women of colour are now affecting more middle-class people, who can cope because platform labour is branded as temporary and even cool. Platform work also demands competencies beyond those needed by agency-hired cleaners: the interpersonal skills of feminised emotional labour, good profile photography and the language skills to manage client relationships without an intermediary. Riemann adds that platform rating systems create what researchers call algorithmic insecurity, in which a bad review can be detrimental to a worker’s livelihood, an effect particularly pervasive in cleaning and childcare because care work is more personalised.

On regulation, the participants assess both progress and limits. Spain’s pioneering Riders’ Law of 2021 obliged delivery platforms to classify couriers as employees and required employers to disclose information on the algorithmic and AI systems affecting working conditions, yet its scope was narrowed from all sectors to riders only, which Blanchard reads as a lack of gender perspective in public policy. Deliveroo closed its Spanish operations, Glovo accumulated millions of euros in fines before contracting 14,000 riders in July 2025, and only Just Eat publicly supported the law. The EU Platform Directive, adopted in 2024 and inspired by such national laws, establishes a presumption of employment where platforms exercise direction and control, but gives broad discretion to national legislators. Meanwhile, examples of techno-solutionism abound: Uber’s Uber Ellas feature in Argentina lets female drivers filter for female clients, while Swiggy in India automatically prevented women from using the platform after six in the evening, a measure critics say depresses women’s earnings without addressing root causes.

The participants’ conclusions point beyond individualised and marketised fixes to the care crisis. Ecker argues research is moving past platform exceptionalism toward the societal conditions underpinning platform models, noting that necessary changes such as reduced working time, higher minimum wages and more inclusive migration regimes may have little to do with technology. Orth calls for longitudinal life-course studies, broader definitions of the labour that makes platforms function, and union initiatives that go beyond the employment contract, such as taxing each gig to fund public infrastructure like toilets and charging stations. Dowling invokes Jane McAlevey’s notion of whole-worker organising, connecting workplace struggles with support structures beyond them. Empowering examples exist, such as the Zurich cleaning cooperative Autonomia, which uses simple digital tools for scheduling and billing without venture capital or sophisticated algorithms, demonstrating that the problem is not the technology itself but how it is deployed in a capitalist economy to further profit making. What emerges most clearly from the conversation is that the feminist question of how to fundamentally transform social reproduction remains as urgent as ever, whether or not an app is involved.

Subject of Research: Feminist perspectives on digital platform labour and the platformisation of care work in Europe

Article Title: Feminist research on platform economies: a conversation on current perspectives and future challenges

Article References: Dowling, E., Blanchard, O., Ecker, Y., Orth, B., & Riemann, M.-L. (2026). Feminist research on platform economies: a conversation on current perspectives and future challenges. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 325-333. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-325-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-325-2026

Keywords: platform labour, feminist research, care work, social reproduction, gig economy, algorithmic management, domestic work, food delivery, migration, EU Platform Directive, gender inequality, Spain Riders Law