Time, gender, and digital research: challenges in research with women drivers during the pandemic

Abstract

Drawing on the fieldwork conducted for my doctoral dissertation, this article discusses the methodological challenges and dilemmas involved in research that intertwines digital tools and gender dynamics. The article aims to examine the methodological challenges of conducting digitally mediated research with women platform workers, based on a study of the work routines and everyday lives of women ride-hailing drivers. The research was carried out through remote interviews conducted via video calls throughout 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these conversations were marked by obstacles related to the demands of women’s everyday lives, particularly amid the health crisis, revealing tensions between the (supposed) self-management of time described by the participants and the care responsibilities that frequently hindered the interviews. What emerged from the interviews was an overlap between productive and reproductive labor, in which women’s time was contested by multiple demands: those of the platform, the household, their children, and their own bodies. The article therefore problematizes the distinct conceptualizations of time experienced by women and men working for platform companies, showing how digital technologies blur the boundaries between different spheres of everyday life, making the domestic and the financialized increasingly permeable to one another. In addition, it examines the methodological strategies adopted to access participants, ranging from the use of social media to snowball sampling. As its main finding, the article argues that using the digital both as a research tool and as an object of analysis requires a specific methodological approach, since digital technologies simultaneously reshape access to the field, the conditions under which research is conducted, and participants’ experiences of work and care.