No Shade in the Gig Economy: A Call for Gender-Equitable Heat Protections

A day in the life of a woman gig worker

Sarita wakes up at 5 am to pack tiffin dabbas for her kids and husband, prepare her kids for school, and drop them off. She works hard and fast throughout the morning, finishing house chores for the day and cooking lunch for herself and her in-laws. It’s only around noon that she gets free to ‘go to work’. Sarita is a beautician and gig worker for Urban Company, a home services platform. She is representative of the typical woman gig worker, who is married with at least one child. For the next 8 hours, she will be travelling to customers’ houses across Mumbai to complete gigs assigned by Urban Company through an app. On an average day, she completes 2-3 separate gigs. At 12 pm, she puts on her work uniform, pulls her 15 kg beauty kit over her shoulder, and walks out the door, despite her in-laws’ grumbles. It is April, which means it is already blazing hot outside - the temperature is close to 40°C.

Most beauty gig workers rely on public transport to reach customers’ homes. In Mumbai, this is itself an arduous process. First, Sarita walks 1-2 kilometres in the heat to reach the shared auto stand closest to her home. For 20 rupees, she can take a share-auto to the train station, from where she gets on a local train that will get her closest to the first customer’s house. Once she gets down, she will take another shared auto, then walk 20-30 minutes to reach the customer’s house. She is carrying her 15 kg bag with her throughout this journey. After the first gig, she continues travelling to her second and third gigs in this way, till she finally reaches home at night. There, she immediately gets to work again, cooking dinner with her mother-in-law’s help, checking in on her kids’ homework, and finishing the remaining chores for the day. 

The vast majority of working people in Mumbai are like Sarita - they cannot afford to use AC buses or AC cabs, which protect travellers from the worst effects of heat stress - and see even private autos and the metro as a luxury. Because of the way gig work and housework are structured, Sarita and other workers like her are exposed to the adverse effects of heat stress every day of work. They lack basic and equal access to basic amenities like toilets, rest stops, and drinking water that can help mitigate these effects and speed recovery. In addition, they get no time to rest and recover at home because of their housework responsibilities.

Heat waves are not gender-neutral

Extreme heat waves are the new normal in India. The heaviest burden of heat stress is borne by outdoor workers such as gig workers, who are outside for 8-12 hours every day. In the summer, gig workers are regularly exposed to extreme temperatures (over 40°C) for prolonged periods of time, making them highly vulnerable to adverse health effects like dehydration, fatigue, heat exhaustion and heat stroke - which can turn fatal. Since failing to meet their daily targets results in a loss of daily wages, gig workers are forced to continue working in unsafe conditions and against health advisories even if their health is seriously at risk. With over 95% of its workforce in informal occupations, India has a huge economic vulnerability to heat, which can slow down productivity, reduce incomes, and create additional health burdens. One study estimated that India lost 247 billion labour hours and $194 billion in economic losses in 2024 alone, due to heat.

Women gig workers face a double burden of work - they have to complete a full shift of housework and paid work every single day, with very little room for error. There is no structural support from the gig platform or from the government that can ease this unfair burden. Faced with restrictive familial expectations and male partners who do not share the load equally, women work hard to develop social bargains or arrangements that allow them to manage their domestic responsibilities while also going to work. While all gig workers experience the severe effects of heat stress, women workers face compounding health burdens because of this double burden of work, combined with the systemic lack of attention paid to women’s health issues. This means that not only is women’s health adversely affected under these circumstances, but it is also more likely to be ignored and left untreated.

Gender-insensitive city infrastructures compound these burdens. For instance, women workers report that they have a lot of difficulty getting consistent access to toilets during their work day. Unlike their male counterparts, they do not have the option to urinate in public, and many women prefer to ‘hold it in’ all day till they reach home in the evening. To do so, they consume less water and are more likely to be dehydrated. This can contribute to a higher incidence of heat strokes and exhaustion. Lack of access to clean toilets during heat waves can be especially dangerous for women who are menstruating, pregnant, postpartum, or experiencing health issues like UTIs. Most metro city infrastructures are not equipped with these basic amenities even at the best of times - amenities that are necessary to help mitigate the effects of an increasingly harsh climate. 

Customers’ homes are key spaces where some of these adverse effects could be mitigated by offering access to toilets and to drinking water. But gig workers report mixed experiences, pointing out that customers rarely allow them to use the toilets in their homes. In a group discussion, a gig worker said, “They don't understand how much time and effort we put in to get there with the traffic, heat, etc. A customer who is paying Rs. 300-400 for a job has the attitude of someone who is paying 1000”. Another gig worker said sarcastically, “We also have Western toilets in our homes, we know how to use them”. Caste patriarchal attitudes often prevent customers from treating gig workers like human beings and recognising the basic dignity of labour. Meanwhile, workers, who are pressured by both customers and platforms to perform well despite unexpected delays and burdens posed by traffic, heat, and air pollution, feel squeezed from both ends. At the end of the day, there is very little time for rest and recovery, as women workers have to go home to finish house chores - this precludes opportunities to chill, loiter, and recover after work in the evening, when it is cooler.

This is to say that the effects of heat stress are not gender neutral. They affect women in different ways because of the social environment around work and family, which treats women’s work and women’s health as less important. Lack of toilets, medical bias against women’s issues, lack of menstrual leave, the expectation to work continuously at home, and no social allowance to rest, mean that women experience heat stress differently from men. These compounding burdens shape women's health in the long-term, as well as their ongoing experiences of work, family, and urban spaces. They also lead to adverse (gendered) effects on mental health, mood, and capacity for managing stress, as documented excellently by Sanket Jain in rural contexts. Overall, women are expected to carry on without addressing exhaustion and health issues, even as they work overtime to meet the high expectations of family members, platform companies, and customers. 

City infrastructures need to support outdoor workers

As a Down to Earth report documents, rapid urbanization and uneven modes of development - with dense construction, concrete pavements, high air pollution, and low green cover - have intensified heat risks in Indian metro cities. Meanwhile, the gig economy is expanding at a fast pace, placing millions of workers at additional heat risk every year. As an elderly male auto driver who has been driving in Mumbai for decades, observed to me, “The city is fast becoming unlivable, and I fall sick constantly now. Everyone keeps falling sick because the conditions in the city are very bad. As an auto driver, I am exposed to this dust and pollution on the road every day, all day”. 

In the male-dominated sectors of gig work, like ride-hailing and delivery, workers are outside all day delivering orders and passengers across the city. They largely work from their own vehicles, but can take limited rest stops in parking lots and dark stores. In contrast, in the female-dominated domestic and care work sectors, workers mainly work out of customers’ homes. They too face severe heat and pollution while travelling during the day, but do not have easy access to shaded rest stops. A report by Heat Watch and the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union documents the gaps in city infrastructures and platform policies that compound heat stress for workers.

Earlier, public parks with shaded areas would be an easily accessible space where women workers would pause to take rest between gigs. On many occasions, accompanying women gig workers during their workday, we have found tiny parks near local train stations and sat down under the cool shade of old trees to catch our breath before the next job. But now, these third spaces are fast disappearing to be replaced by more gatekept places that require payment for entry, like coffee shops and cafes - places that are inaccessible to daily wage workers. The existing parks are shut for many hours of the day, including the hot afternoons when they are most needed. Yet, other, older city infrastructures for workers still remain and offer precious spots of support in an increasingly heat-stressed landscape. On a particularly hot day, I was accompanying Bhavya and Saba, two beauty gig workers, on their gigs in Mumbai. We were facing heat exhaustion and feeling extremely thirsty. They dismissed my water bottle because it had ‘sada pani’ (lukewarm water), and they wanted cold water. Outside Sion station, there were two gigantic matkis (earthen pots) full of water. Bhavya poured out my bottle and filled it with cold matki water - and we all had our fill in the blazing heat before carrying on. She said, “At my mother’s house, we only have matki water, not even fridge water - it’s the best”. 

When planning for resources to mitigate the effects of heat waves, it is important not to forget simple, effective, and long-standing solutions like these, which often get passed over for solutions that can generate more resource extraction and pollution in the long run (like relying on plastic water bottles for instance).

Structural protections need to actually reach gig workers

Gig workers are largely unprotected by both platforms and government policies, as they do not qualify as ‘employees’ under current labour laws. Gig platforms go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging them as such, by calling them ‘partners’ or ‘contractors’ instead. This means that they are not eligible for health insurance, accident insurance, life insurance, paid leave, sick leave, or other benefits from their employers. Their status also prevents them from using the law to access the minimum protections that should be available to all workers. Aarti, a gig worker who was protesting against Urban Company told me, “We want our rights. We want a PF. We are spending all our energy, burning our bodies in the heat and rain, wasting our youth and life on them, but we want PF to secure our old age, even if they take 1000 rupees every month from us for it”. 

At the same time, there has been some progress on protecting workers from the adverse impacts of heat waves. Heat Action Plans have been mandated by the government across cities and states. Some platform companies have set up limited rest shelters for gig workers after public outcry around 10-minute deliveries and the conditions of work for delivery workers. The Code on Social Security (2020) seeks to recognize gig workers and render them eligible to some protections, and new state-wide legislation in Rajasthan and Karnataka seeks to ensure welfare and benefits for gig workers. 

However, we are still a long way from materializing these promises into the daily lives of gig workers, and these policies and plans do not incorporate a gender-sensitive lens that would address the additional burdens faced by women workers. As a Center for Policy Research report argues, the Heat Action Plans fail to provide contextual and locally-sensitive solutions, and to consider the differential needs of vulnerable groups of workers. Taking an intersectional and gender-sensitive approach is crucial to the success of heat protection plans across all groups of gig workers. Addressing heat stress - and more widely, the exploitative working conditions set by platforms - requires both platform and government interventions, made with gender-equitable outcomes in mind.