All work involves a technique, and this relationship has become increasingly intimate. Due to the combination of a context marked by the precariousness of labor relations with the possibilities of technological development, digital platforms have become increasingly relevant based on promises of optimized, neutral, and autonomous services. These companies, such as Uber and Ifood, have been gaining global relevance with their proposals for technological mediation and providing increasingly faster and cheaper services. They present themselves as technology companies that simply connect service providers with customers, without holding any responsibility for the performance of the work.

There has been much discussion about the consequences of the platformized work model, and the effects and dangers of platformization, most of which take into account a generalized mass of workers, leaving aside important gender, race, and class differences. Talking about work is never something generic and applicable to everyone. Work is always biased and it is always situated. In other words: the workloads, expectations, and ways of doing work will never be the same, as several forces are operating in these contexts, which mix past, present, and possibilities for the future.

Conceiving an experience that escapes generalizations, this work investigates the experience of women drivers and delivery women for digital platforms in Brazil, analyzing their narratives from the perspective of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). From the interviews, we can trace clues of an intersectional experience that results from the intertwining of 3 major axes: work, technology, and gender. Together, these elements make up a unique scenario, where the dynamics of a sexual division of labor that began with capitalism and continues to this day, the fragmentation of labor proposed by Toyotism, the context of socioeconomic instability in Brazil inherited from a colonial past and the new work dynamics proposed by digital platforms, are mixed.

The main results of this research are an experience marked by: 1) a discourse of neutrality preached by the platforms, where women are treated within a homogeneous mass of “workers”; 2) flexibility as a model of precarious work, which is presented to these women as a possibility of conciliation; 3) a narrative of empowerment, which is appropriated by companies as a way of attracting more women to make up this workforce.