Challenging the Gender Neutrality of On-Demand Mobility Platforms

Abstract

In this article we chart a conceptual path to challenge the presumed gender neutrality of on-demand mobility platforms (ODMPs) as an effort to unlock an entry point for feminist critiques and interventions. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of dispositif, the ODMP is theorized as a “platform assemblage”—a complex sociotechnical system encompassing the digital and the nondigital stack that are mutually constituted in a contingent, relational, and contextual way. We employed a quantitative feminist approach to unpacking the “black-boxed” gender neutrality of the sociotechnical system. We argue that the gender nonneutrality is more than merely a symptom of the immanent masculinist propensities of ODMPs, but also the origin and organ that simultaneously represent the phenomena, processes, and products of how the gender relations of power operate through digitally mediated mobilities, while contextually, relationally, and rhizomatically coopting into and with other always-already gendered social categories. We first argue that gendered practices and processes of digitally mediated mobilities and gender nonneutrality of ODMPs in the digital stack are relational and mutually constituted. ODMPs actively abstract extant gender inequalities in daily mobilities into “idiotic” data derivatives, feeding and propagating into the platform demand and pricing calculi that algorithmically prioritize mobile and masculine subjects, perpetuating or amplifying gender inequalities in digitally mediated mobilities. The digital presences and practices of ODMPs create new temporalities and spatialities of daily mobilities that are perceived as gender-specific time–space fixity and flexibility. Furthermore, ODMP-mediated mobilities have not fundamentally disrupted the conservative gendered power relations at home, and the masculinist form of control over familial automobility.