India, now the most populous country globally, has a long history of low female employment. However, even among employed women, almost 92% were engaged in the informal employment compared to 88% men. In 2021-22, the female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) for working-age group was 32.8% compared to the global average of 47%. Recent national surveys indicate substantial improvement in the FLFPR from 23.3% to 41.7%. This was mainly driven by an increase of 23% (24.6% to 47.6%), in rural areas. As many as 43.04% of women reported childcare and homemaking responsibilities, and 37.94% reported continuing education as key reasons for being out of workforce. Even when employed, most women engage in low-skilled, low-paid (28% women engaged in low-paid and unskilled jobs compared to 22% men) and precarious work (Kelkar, 2014), indicating gender-based occupational segregation. These feminized jobs mostly include domestic helpers, cleaners, street vendors, garbage collectors, personal care, housekeeping, salesperson, office and customer service clerks. We focus on the domestic and care work sector in India, for this study.

In absence of official statiscs, infromal estimates of domestic/care workers range from 4.2 million to over 50 million (NDWM). The increase in supply as well as demand of domestic/care workers over time is mainly attributable to scarce employment opportunities, additional income through self-employment (Ghosh, 2014), and urbanisation. Besides being feminized, this sector also mostly employs unskilled rural women and the urban poor. However, being largely unregulated, it creates difficult, poor, and sometimes precarious working conditions for several of these vulnerable workers.

In this backdrop, we examine digital labour platforms (like like Urban Company (UC), BookMyBai, HouseJoy, Broomies, WorkIndia) gradually emerging in this sector in urban India. Using qualitative data gathered from interviews conducted with workers (all females) associated with one of these swiftly growing digital platforms, we analyze the experiences of female domestic/care workers. The key research questions are: (1) What are the challenges faced by female workers and digital platform aggregator companies while streamlining work in this highly informal sector? and (2) What role does/should the state play for ensuring decent working conditions in this sector, and regulating businesses? We find that digital gender divide, spousal attitude, distrust, inadequate platform support are common challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first academic studies in India to study platform work in domestic/care work from a gendered lens.