By Margarita Dimova

TL;DR A gender lens offers a crucial perspective that reveals how our world, from overcooled offices to biased algorithms, is shaped by gender. By applying this lens to everything we do, we can build more equitable and effective systems for everyone.

Did you know that offices in warmer climates are often overcooled? Beyond the energy use implications, there is something else to unpick here. The overcooling is the documented result of men’s preferences dominating workspaces. Not only that, but overcooling disproportionately affects women’s wellbeing. It’s a perfect example of how our lived experiences are always gendered, but not always recognised as such.

Gender is a lens, not just a topic

Gender is often enough afforded the status of a standalone topic, something for a special report, agenda or curriculum item, discussion point or intervention. That’s exactly what we want to challenge!

For us, gender is not a box to be ticked or a single chapter in a larger story. Instead, we see gender as an absolutely crucial lens through which we must examine everything we do. It’s a fundamental variable that impacts how individuals interact with work, with each other, on jobtech platforms and beyond. It profoundly shapes the opportunities we can access, the quality of our work, and our satisfaction with it.

In our work on gender, we share the understanding that: 

• Gender is also not just about women. It’s about understanding the complex interplay of identities, expectations, and systemic biases that affect everyone. When we talk about gender, we’re talking about rigid norms and other structural factors that can define men’s choices, just as much as we are looking into the compounded barriers faced by women. 
• Women are underserved populations, rather than marginalised ones. Women make up half of the human population, so using the term “marginalised” can subtract from the sheer demographic prowess of women.
• Our biological sex and our socio-cultural gender are two different things. While sex is about biology, gender is about the roles, behaviours, and expectations that society attaches to being a man or a woman. Gendered expectations are woven into the very fabric of our societies and define the opportunities we all have in managing our livelihoods. 

Applying the gender lens to everything we do and learn

When we bring this understanding to the world of jobtech, it opens up so many questions and possibilities. We will explore them in the next few months with intense focus, but will also continue incorporating the gender lens in all the ecosystem work and research we do. We have launched a groundbreaking (gender) inclusivity framework scoring tool for founders, who are already making adjustments to their strategy and operations based on it. We will share more on this later this month.

Through our venture building support over the years, we’ve also explored how caregiving responsibilities—which are still disproportionately shouldered by women—impact participation and performance in the gig economy. We’ve questioned how algorithms, which are often presented as neutral, can perpetuate and even amplify existing gender biases. We’ve looked into gender and intersectionality through our work with refugees, and brought gender considerations in our more practical insights into, say, platform cutout. 

There are many other examples of how a gendered lens provides a more holistic view of what works (and for whom) on jobtech platforms:

• An algorithm designed to match workers with gigs obviously learns from historical data. If that data reflects a world where men were predominantly hired for logistics and tech repair jobs, the algorithm might unconsciously start prioritising men candidates for those roles today. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle, making it harder for women to break into men-dominated sectors, even on a supposedly neutral platform.
• The gig economy is often praised for its flexibility—a key selling point for women juggling caregiving responsibilities. But what happens when that flexibility comes with a penalty, if a platform’s algorithm penalises workers for rejecting jobs or logging off unexpectedly—say, to pick up a sick child from school—it disproportionately affects primary caregivers, who are still overwhelmingly women. 
• Jobtech offers an opportunity for women to break into traditionally men-dominated sectors. But how can this happen? How can participation be equitable? Women founders we work with are still struggling to attract women to their platforms due to persistent social norms about gendered categories of work.
• User-generated rating systems are the currency of trust on most platforms. But numerous studies have shown that unconscious bias can seep into reviews. Customers may use different language or score men and women differently for the exact same quality of service, impacting a worker’s future earnings and opportunities.

This thinking is not new for us. Inclusivity is at the heart of the Jobtech Alliance’s mission. We are committed to making jobtech viable, scalable, dignified and impactful for all. 

We are laying the groundwork for a deeper dive into how women can be successfully engaged by jobtech platforms, and what the business case for inclusivity really looks like. We will soon be publishing a seminal learning study on gender, offering a comprehensive look at all our learnings on this topic from across the entire programme. It will bring together deep, nuanced insights from our portfolio of platforms, our ecosystem, and, of course, workers themselves. This cements our commitment to including a gender lens in everything that we do!