The gig economy is not just exploitative, it’s also sexist – here’s how

While she’s been busily trying to skewer her own country with a dismal Brexit deal she won’t let us vote on, the burning injustices Theresa May highlighted upon her entry into Downing Street have continued to blaze.

Take the gig economy. ETZ Payments – a company that provides “back office software” to recruitment firms – took the opportunity of the Institute for Fiscal Studies announcing a review into inequality earlier this week to highlight that its female workers suffer from a substantial gender pay gap.

The most recent research it found into the issue was conducted by the TUC in 2017 as part of a report into insecure work. It discovered that female agency, or gig, workers make on average £80 a week less than their male counterparts.

That women workers too often fall victim to exploitation and discrimination in the workplace is well known.

The fact that it is happening in a sector of the labour market where all workers are prone to exploitation, abuse and simply being short changed shouldn’t perhaps come as a great surprise.

Nonetheless, while ETZ’s motives in raising the issue weren’t entirely pure (it was seeking to draw attention to the payments software it sells) the point was still well made.

By now you may have spotted the problem with what it was saying, however. The TUC’s figures date back to 2017 and we’re currently nearly half way through 2019.

More up to date official data is lacking because while the government has instituted annual gender pay gap reporting for firms with over 250 employees, the rules don’t cover agency workers, contractors or freelancers. Firms are only required to publish data on people who are directly employed on a full-time basis.

As such, while the submissions of an Uber or a Deliveroo will cover their directly employed head office staff, techies, admin people, managers, accountants, marketeers and so on, but they won’t cover their drivers or their riders, whom they don’t consider to be employees, despite the fact that they are the mainstays of these businesses.

We don’t know what’s going on with them. But my friends at the TUC kindly pointed me to research coming out of the US that gives an idea of the problem that the official figures are missing.

A Stanford University study of Uber drivers in that country, published a couple of months ago, put the gap between what the male and female workers make at roughly 7 per cent.

Gender pay gap reporting is a vanishingly rare example of a good policy instituted by the current government. But given the size of the gig economy, its growth, and the problems it is causing, it needs an update.

It needs to be extended, and as a matter of urgency, not least because of the beneficial impact it could have across the gig economy.

Hannah Smith, writing for The Independent around the time the TUC published its report, identified a number of reasons behind why female freelancers, and gig workers, get less across the board in a wide range of industries. Sometimes it’s a lack of confidence to ask for more, sometimes it’s as a result of pressure from the “employer”.

It’s time to flip that. The pressure gender pay reporting has put on traditional employers has yielded some useful results. Several have instituted programmes with the aim of trying to address the issues leading to the gender pay imbalances they’ve reported, such as the sometimes glaring lack of women in higher paying roles.

The same pressure could have an impact on the practices of the new breed of firms that have built their businesses on the backs of temps, freelancers and other types of insecure workers.

The gig economy is generally in need of a shake up. It ruthlessly exploits workers who have few rights and can find themselves getting paid less than the minimum wage while doing without the sick pay, holiday pay and pensions more traditional employees take for granted.

The government maintains that it wants to address inequalities, but the gender pay gap that appears to exist there in addition to these issues further emphasises the need for reform and casts an unflattering light upon its failure to enact it.