La Independiente: Designing Ubiquitous Systems for Latin American and Caribbean Women Crowdworkers
Maya De Los Santos, Norma Elva Chávez, Alberto Navarrete, Cristina Martínez Pinto, Luz Elena González, Tatiana Telles-Calderon, Saiph Savage · 2023
Since 2018, Venezuelans have contributed to 75% of leading AI crowd work platforms’ total workforce [15], and it is very likely other Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries will follow in the context of the post covid-19 economic recovery [7]. While crowd work presents new opportunities for employment in regions of the world where local economies have stagnated[11], few initiatives have investigated the impact of such work in the Global South through the lens of feminist theory. To address this knowledge gap, we surveyed 55 LAC women on the crowd work platform Toloka to understand their personal goals, professional values, and hardships faced in their work. Our results revealed that most participants shared a desire to hear the experiences of other women crowdworkers, mainly to help them navigate tasks, develop technical and soft skills, and manage their finances more efficiently. Additionally, 75% of the women reported that they completed crowd work tasks on top of caring for their families, while over 50% confirmed they needed to negotiate their family responsibilities to pursue crowd work in the first place. These findings demonstrated a vital component lacking from the experiences of these women was a sense of connection with one another. Based on these observations, we propose a system designed to foster community between LAC women in crowd work to improve their personal and professional advancement.