Spatial Crowdsourcing: Opportunities and Challenges in Motivating Malaysian Women’s participation in Gig Economy

Abstract

Recent growth in the gig economy system has triggered Malaysia to venture into crowdsourcing initiatives including spatial crowdsourcing platforms that required specific-location of tasks to be conducted physically. This new phenomenon offered opportunities to crowd workers to improve their economy and livelihood by generating income through physical tasks such as e-hailing, food delivery, and household chores. Despite the opportunities, there are also challenges faced by crowd workers, who can be anybody including women. Women are one of the specific targeted groups identified to support Malaysia’s economic growth. To fully harness the benefits of spatial crowdsourcing trends for women, it is necessary to understand the factors that motivate them to participate in spatial crowdsourcing platform since it is still in the infancy state. This paper presents the preliminary exploratory study using semi-structured interviews to investigate the women’s motivational factors to participate in spatial crowdsourcing platforms. Thematic analysis was performed to identify the pattern of themes from the data gathered. Several intrinsic and extrinsic factors were identified, and trust emerged as one of the primary concerns among women to participate in this new phenomenon.