Precarious Selling: Gender, Disability, and Everyday Platform Work on Shopee and Tokopedia in Indonesia

Technical Summary: Precarious Selling: Gender, Disability, and Everyday Platform Work on Shopee and Tokopedia in Indonesia

Problem Statement
While digital platforms like Shopee and Tokopedia are celebrated in Indonesia for democratizing market access and fostering economic inclusion, this narrative often obscures the specific realities of marginalized groups. This article addresses the gap in existing literature regarding women with disabilities, a group facing compounded discrimination due to gender norms, restricted mobility, and structural ableism. The central problem investigated is whether digital platforms genuinely enable inclusion or if they merely reorganize existing inequalities, producing new forms of precarious labor. The study challenges the assumption that access to digital markets equates to economic security, arguing instead that for women with disabilities, inclusion is conditional, unstable, and shaped by intersecting gendered and ableist structures.

Methodology
The research employs a qualitative, feminist participatory approach grounded in crip technoscience and feminist political economy.

• Data Collection: The study is based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted over a 12-month period (2024–2025) with 15 women with disabilities selling on Shopee and/or Tokopedia across Java (Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang, Yogyakarta). Participants ranged in age from 23 to 52 and included individuals with mobility, visual, and hearing impairments, as well as chronic illnesses.
• Analytical Framework: The analysis utilizes a three-tiered framework:
  • Micro: Individual experiences of managing selling alongside care work, disability management, and customer interactions.
  • Meso: Platform-level dynamics, including algorithms, rating systems, and visibility regimes.
  • Macro: Structural contexts, including Indonesia's digital inclusion policies, gender norms, and systemic ableism.
• Positionality: The researcher, a Javanese woman and mother of a child with an intellectual disability, adopts a position of "situated knowledge," engaging not as an objective observer but as someone sharing cultural and embodied experiences of navigating normative systems.
• Ethical Approach: The study adheres to crip research ethics, prioritizing informed consent, participant verification of transcripts, and the use of research for advocacy rather than mere data extraction.

Key Contributions
The paper makes three primary contributions to feminist scholarship on digital labor and disability studies:

1. Foregrounding Disability: It introduces disability as a critical, yet largely absent, dimension in debates on gender and digitalization, utilizing the lens of crip technoscience to analyze how technology design encodes ableist norms.
2. Theoretical Innovation: It proposes the concept of "precarious inclusion" to theorize a condition where access to digital markets is granted, yet participation remains unstable and unequal. This concept captures the ambivalence of gaining income and autonomy while facing algorithmic discrimination, customer ableism, and intensified care burdens.
3. Reframing Inequality: It demonstrates that platforms do not simply expand access but actively reorganize inequality. The article argues that inclusion without structural transformation becomes a new mode of precarity, where the "freedom" to work is contingent on conforming to normative standards of productivity and speed that often exclude disabled bodies.

Results and Analysis
The analysis reveals that precarious inclusion is produced at the intersection of individual struggle, platform design, and structural inequality:

• Micro Level (Embodied Experience): Platform work is inextricably linked to reproductive labor and care work. Women navigate "crip time"—a temporality that disrupts normative expectations of speed—while facing platform governance that demands rapid responses and shipping. The physical and sensory costs of selling (e.g., pain from arthritis, inability to use voice calls due to hearing loss) are often penalized by rating systems that do not distinguish between negligence and disability. Customer ableism further exacerbates this, as users often penalize sellers for response times dictated by their impairments.
• Meso Level (Platform Governance): Algorithms and rating systems function as mechanisms of control that disadvantage women with disabilities. Visibility is often contingent on the ability to pay for advertising, creating a barrier for those with lower incomes. Rating systems transfer risk to sellers, holding them accountable for factors beyond their control (e.g., courier delays) while penalizing slower response times inherent to certain disabilities. The lack of transparency in algorithmic decision-making prevents sellers from understanding or contesting their exclusion.
• Macro Level (Policy and Structure): Indonesia's digital inclusion policies (e.g., "Making Indonesia 4.0," "Digital Talent Scholarship") largely ignore disability, assuming a "generic user" and focusing on access rather than the quality of participation. The 2016 Disability Law, while mandating accessibility, lacks specific provisions for digital platforms and algorithmic discrimination. Consequently, women with disabilities face a regulatory gap where they have legal protections on paper but no recourse against platform discrimination. Gender norms further intensify their burden, as they are expected to fulfill traditional care roles while engaging in platform labor.

Significance and Claims
The paper claims that the current model of digital inclusion for women with disabilities in Indonesia constitutes "precarious inclusion." This condition is characterized by the coexistence of access and marginalization. While platforms offer income and a degree of autonomy denied by formal employment, they simultaneously reproduce and reorganize gendered and ableist inequalities.

The significance of this work lies in its demonstration that access is not sufficient for justice. The article argues that without structural transformation—specifically in platform design, algorithmic governance, and policy frameworks—digital inclusion becomes a new mode of precarity. The study concludes that genuine inclusion requires moving beyond access-focused approaches to embrace structural changes that center disabled knowledge, challenge compulsory able-bodiedness in technology design, and provide meaningful accountability mechanisms for platform workers. Until such transformations occur, women with disabilities will remain "present but not protected, participating but not powerful, included but not secure."