Observers of the gig economy have long been attentive to discrimination concerns in this new space of labor exchange, but the nature of their concerns vary. Some of the articles in this category emphasize the continued potential for service providers to discriminate against consumers on the basis of race, sex, and other protected categories despite the neutrality promised by algorithmic systems. Other articles examine the potential for consumers to discriminate against gig workers, either in the way consumers select service providers or in the way they rate them. Together, these works ask whether the gig economy meaningfully impacts the frequency and severity of discrimination in labor exchange and, if gig work does have some effect, whether that effect is positive or negative.

Bibliographic Entries

Bartlett, Katherine T. and Mitu Gulati. “Discrimination by Customers.” Iowa Law Review 102 (2016): 223–257. Read Here

Barzilary, Arianne Renan and Anat Ben-David. “Platform Inequality: Gender in the Gig-Economy.” Seton Hall Law Review 47 (2017): 393-431. Read Here

Bodie, Matthew T., Miriam A. Cherry, Marcia L. McCormick, and Jintong Tang. “The Law and Policy of People Analytics.”  The University of Colorado Law Review 961 (2017): 962-1042. Read Here

Calo and Rosenblat, “The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power.” (2017). Read Here

Cansoy, Mehmet and Juliet Schor. 2016. “Who Gets to Share in the ‘Sharing Economy’: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb.” Boston College, May 2016. Read Here

Edelman, Benjamin, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky. “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9, no. 2 (2016): 1-22. Read Here

Hannák, Anikó, Claudia Wagner, David Garcia, Alan Mislove, Markus Strohmaier, and Christo Wilson. “Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces: Evidence from TaskRabbit and Fiverr.” CSCW 2017, February 25 – March 1, 2017. Read Here

Kakar, Venoo, et al. “The Visible Host: Does Race Guide Airbnb Rental Rates in San Francisco?” Journal of Housing Economics 25 (2018). Read Here

Leong, Nancy. “New Economy, Old Biases.” Minnesota Law Review 100 (2016): 2153–2166. Read Here

Leong, Nancy, and Aaron Belzer. “The New Public Accommodations: Race Discrimination in the Platform Economy.” The Georgetown Law Journal 105 (2017): 1271–1322. Read Here

Ravenelle, Alexandria. “Belong Anywhere? How Airbnb is Dismantling Generations of Civil Rights in the Name of Progress.” (2016). Read Here

Schoenbaum, Naomi. “Gender and the Sharing Economy.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 43 (2016): 1023-1070. Read Here

Scott and Brown, “Redefining and Regulating the New Sharing Economy,” (2017).

Todisco, Michael. “Share and Share Alike? Considering Racial Discrimination in the Nascent Room-Sharing Economy.” Stanford Law Review Online 67 (2015): 121–129. Read Here

Van Doorn, Niels. “Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized
Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the ‘On-Demand’ Economy.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (2017): 898-914. Read Here

Zatz, Noah. “Beyond Misclassification: Gig Economy Discrimination Outside Employment Law.” On Labor (January 19, 2016). Read Here