INEQUALITY AND DISCRIMINATION IN THE ONLINE LABOR MARKET: A SCOPING REVIEW

Abstract

Online labor markets present opportunities to exchange work for money that require different resources and skills than the traditional labor market. Unlike other forms of participation in the realm of society that happens on and via the Internet, participating as an independent contractor in an online labor market does not only depend on individual access to technology, knowledge, motivation, and skills, but also on the preferences and biases of both the hiring party and the mediating platform. We conduct a scoping review to examine how the existing body of literature has approached inequality, discrimination, and bias with regards to paid online labor. Conceptualizing online participation as a multistage process, we build a model of participation and success in the online labor market as a pipeline. Based on a comprehensive set of studies collected via five academic databases, we map prior literature across the pipeline’s stages of becoming an independent contractor and find that most of the prior literature focuses on later stages, such as having been hired. Ultimately, we identify remaining puzzles and advocate for the importance of studying the precursors of online labor outcomes.