The study, published in Geographica Helvetica by Corinna Hertweck, Aniko Hannak and Karin Schwiter, set out to answer a question that official statistics cannot. Because most childcare arranged through marketplace platforms remains informal, conventional labour market surveys capture only a fraction of the market. The Swiss government’s most comprehensive report on platform labour, published in 2021, relied on the Swiss Labour Market Survey and concluded that platform work is marginal and generates only small additional incomes, so no legal reform was needed. The Federal Council reaffirmed that position in 2024 when it declined to take further action in response to the European Union directive on improving working conditions in platform work. The Zurich team argues that this assessment misses the point, because the bulk of the platform economy is invisible to the surveys on which the conclusion rested.

To build an alternative picture, the researchers scraped data from eight childcare platforms operating in German-speaking Switzerland, plus one elderly care platform as a contrasting case: Babysitting24, Babysits.ch, Care.com, MisGrosi, RockMyBaby, ZipfelZapf, GreatAuPair and Tagesmutter Verein Zürich, along with Babysitting24’s sister platform Seniorservice24. The technical work was considerable. Larger platforms required postal code searches across every Swiss postal code, using the official directory from the Federal Office of Topography, and profiles returned in multiple neighbouring searches had to be deduplicated using unique user IDs. Foreign profiles picked up near border areas were removed with the help of OpenStreetMap location data. The team ran its scrapers mainly at night with delays between requests to avoid overloading servers, kept research accounts invisible to other users, and stored all data securely, reporting results only in aggregated form.

The resulting dataset covered roughly 58,000 worker profiles and 25,000 customer profiles. The market it revealed is strikingly concentrated: the largest platform, Babysitting24, holds ten times more profiles than any competitor, a pattern the authors attribute to network effects that push users toward the biggest platform in the hope of finding the best offers. Activity levels varied widely, with between 14 and 37 percent of workers and 8 to 38 percent of customers counted as active per platform, where active meant logging in within the last 31 days and having registered more than 31 days earlier. Combining the three largest platforms and removing apparent duplicates by name, age and municipality yielded about 11,500 active childcare workers. Set against the roughly 100,000 formal day care spots in Switzerland, which at a care ratio of one to four corresponds to about 25,000 formal day care workers, the platform workforce is far from negligible.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns the balance between supply and demand. On nearly every platform, workers outnumber customers, by factors ranging from 2.18 to 11.01 among all profiles and from 5.28 to 9.43 among active users. This surplus workforce is not an accident: platforms deliberately cultivate an oversupply of workers because it gives customers more choice and flexibility. The cost of that abundance falls on the workers, whose bargaining position weakens and many of whom remain on standby, searching for jobs that may never materialise. The one exception is telling. MisGrosi, a platform whose name translates as “my grandma” and which aims to connect parents with substitute grandmothers, has customers outnumbering workers by a factor of 22.5. The authors hypothesise that parents may expect grandparent figures to care for little or no pay, framing the work as an act of love rather than labour.

Measuring how much work platforms actually mediate proved elusive. Review counts and booking data were extremely sparse: the median number of reviews per worker profile was zero on every platform, and mean bookings per worker ranged from just 0.10 to 0.14. Given the high user numbers, the researchers interpret this not as evidence of an inactive market but as a sign that workers and customers typically make contact on the platform and then arrange the transaction off-platform, likely to avoid commissions. The upshot is sobering for anyone hoping that digital traces would make informal care work countable. Even in an age of apparent data abundance, much feminised care work remains invisible, not only in labour statistics but also in the platforms’ own records.

The demographic profile of the workforce confirms how deeply gendered this labour segment remains. Using name-based gender inference with a minimum accuracy threshold of 80 percent, the researchers found that women constitute the overwhelming majority of worker profiles on every platform, ranging from 78.8 percent on the senior care platform to 88.3 percent on Care.com and Tagesmutter Verein Zürich, with male workers typically between 3 and 10 percent. On the demand side, the picture is similar: on the large platform disclosing customer names, 58 percent of job posters were inferred to be women and 23 percent men. The data give no indication that platformisation is reducing the feminisation of childcare work. Moreover, the authors note that platforms actively reinforce gendered divisions through their own design choices, from the name MisGrosi itself to the photographs of female care workers on the entry pages of several platforms.

Age patterns further segment the market. Childcare platforms attract markedly young workers: the median age on Babysits is 21, with 66.5 percent of workers under 25, while Babysitting24 shows a median of 25 and Care.com a median of 29. The senior care platform Seniorservice24, by contrast, has a median worker age of 43 and only 8.3 percent under 25. The researchers also observed that some profiles appear younger than the platforms’ official minimum ages of 15 or 18, suggesting age restrictions are sometimes bypassed by entering the minimum allowed age, which effectively truncates the lower end of the observed distributions.

The geographical analysis is where the study most directly challenges received wisdom. Standardising user locations across Switzerland’s multilingual municipality names, a process that successfully mapped all but 0.32 percent of the 88,269 user locations, the team cross-referenced worker and customer prevalence with Federal Statistical Office population density data. Because many small municipalities have no registered users, standard rank correlations risk being misleading, so the researchers combined Kendall’s tau-b for the largest platform with locally weighted scatterplot smoothing for the rest. On Babysitting24, the correlation between population density and workers per capita was weak, with tau of 0.21 for workers and 0.16 for customers, and the smoothed trends ranged from flat to weakly increasing, sometimes even non-monotonic. Crucially, the authors found evidence that some workers register in dense city-centre locations rather than where they actually live, to maximise visibility to customers, which means the true correlation is likely even weaker than measured.

The implications reach beyond Switzerland. If platform-mediated care work is not primarily urban, then the dominant image of the platform worker as a city-dwelling delivery rider or driver is incomplete, and theories of platformisation built on urban density need revision. The authors acknowledge substantial limitations: French- and Italian-speaking platforms were excluded, app-only platforms could not be scraped, mediated transactions cannot be counted, the binary gender classification leaves non-binary identities invisible, and the 31-day activity measure undercounts workers who take longer breaks, such as for maternity leave. Much of the market therefore remains opaque even to this counter-mapping effort. Yet the core message stands: a substantial, heavily feminised and geographically dispersed platform workforce exists where official statistics see none, and future research, the authors suggest, might follow a female childcare worker searching for platform jobs in a rural setting to understand how platformisation reshapes labour beyond the city limits.

Subject of Research: The scale and geography of platform-mediated childcare work in Switzerland, assessed by scraping online care platforms

Article Title: Extending the platform debate beyond cities: assessing the scale and scope of platform-mediated childcare work in Switzerland

Article References: Hertweck, C., Hannak, A., & Schwiter, K. (2026). Extending the platform debate beyond cities: assessing the scale and scope of platform-mediated childcare work in Switzerland. Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 651-664. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-651-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-651-2026

Keywords: platform work, childcare, gig economy, Switzerland, web scraping, feminist labour studies, platform urbanism, care work, gender inequality, rural labour markets, data ethics, labour market informality