When you look at the job reports for December 2020, it was pretty shocking. The U.S. lost 140,000 jobs in total that month. Overall, women lost 156,000 jobs. And men gained 16,000 jobs. The difference? 140,000. You can say women once held all the 140,000 jobs lost to close out 2020. In total, about 2.5 million women lost their jobs thanks to Covid-19 in 2020. Now women deliver on various platforms to earn income.
Many Women Turn To Delivery Gigs During The Pandemic
In May of 2019, NPR reported that 50% of Instacart’s shoppers were women. At the time, food delivery platforms like Postmates and DoorDash said similar numbers. 48% of Postmates were women. Half of DoorDash’s Dashers in the rural areas were women. In the city, this was higher, 60%. These statistics were pre-Covid.
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Fast forward to 2020.
Postmate got acquired by Uber in 2020. Uber shared some data with CBS News. On the Uber Eats platform, between April 2020 to the beginning of 2021, the number of women doing delivery doubled. Almost 50% of their UberEats drivers are female.
DoorDash added almost 2 million new Dashers in the first six and a half months of the pandemic. 55% of its fleet are women.
Instacart? It had 200,000 shoppers before Covid. It added 300,000 new shoppers at the beginning of Covid. Not in all of 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic. That’s 300,000 new shoppers running around hunting down toilet papers all over America. And 70% of Instacart shoppers are women.
More Women Deliver On Gig Platforms In General
It’s worth noting that Uber Eats doubled the number of women on the platform but only brought its total number of women to 50%. This change tells you that the Uber platform before Covid had a majority of men on it. It makes sense. Safety was a huge concern for many female drivers since rideshare became a mainstream thing.
Regardless, the number of female drivers on the Uber platform has jumped considerably since 2017. That year, Uber collaborated with Stanford on a study, and that study reported that 27% of drivers were female.
And according to Statista, the ratio of male to female Uber rideshare drivers has increased quite a bit over the past three years. Globally, around 59% of Uber rideshare workers are male, and 40% are female.
It could be that the future of work involves a gig economy that women will power.
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