As the concept of gig popularises, there is a surge in the participation of women who are willing to take up a gig job, due to the awareness and convenience that the industry offers.

According to data from gig marketplace Taskmo, formerly known as FeedmyPockets, gig economy saw a three-fold jump in women participation in H2 (July to December) 2021 and the trend is likely to continue.

“In a month- around 10,000 to 12,000 women apply for tasks on the platform, whereas before six months, there were only 200-4000 women participants. Additionally, industries like fintech, edtech, e-commerce, fashion tech and health-tech are showing maximum job allocation for women gig workers,” says the Taskmo report.

“This exponential increase can be attributed to the awareness and convenience that the gig industry offers to their participants. Women candidates, who had applied at Taskmo are mainly preferred for job roles such as – customer support, content monitoring and moderation, tele-sales, audits and surveys” said Prashant Janadri, co-founder, Taskmo.

The report is based on the data collected from Taskmo platform on trends of women participation in the gig economy. The platform, which sees completion of over 10,000 tasks per day,  caters to enterprises, SMBs and start-ups helping them outsource on-ground, operational tasks to distributed gig workers in ‘pay-based-task’ modules and hires gig workers in hourly, monthly, and full-time roles in ‘pay-per-hire’ basis.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a paradigm shift in women opting for Gig jobs. An analysis of the data from the platform also showed a steady difference in the demographic details of women workers. Around 50% of women who registered at Taskmo were from urban areas or Tier 1 cities, around 30% belonged to Tier 2 cities and close to 20% were from Tier 3 cities. This change in the demography of women workers is highly remarkable as in the pre-pandemic times, 70-75% of women workers were from Tier 1 cities alone.  

A majority of the women workers come from Tier 1 cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Bangalore being the most preferred and Chennai the least. Although task opportunities are not gender biased, most women end up being employed in customer support, content monitoring and moderation, telesales, audits and surveys.