After Petosky tweeted about her experience, Airbnb banned the host in question, more than a year after the initial incident had passed. As part of new efforts to remove what it terms "unconscious bias" from the site, it has also hired its first-ever head of diversity."We have a zero tolerance policy for discrimination and when we become aware of it we take action," an spokesperson for Airbnb told Broadly, pointing to safety workshops for female users and additional training for employees and hosts. Though it's hard to argue Petosky encountered anything other than conscious discrimination, Airbnb is also running an ongoing internal review into how to eliminate unconscious bias.It was night-time and there was a stranger in my own house. I felt forced to give him extra money.
27-year-old Zoe* hired a Handy cleaner via the app last year. "He turned up late and was really aggressive from the start, telling me I couldn't live this way [so messily], getting angry when I asked him to clean the entrance hallway. I got freaked out so left, hoping when I came back he'd be gone, but he'd overstayed his time and ignored my repeated suggestions for him to leave." Eventually she paid an extra $40 for him to go. "It was night-time and there was a stranger in my own house. I felt forced to give him extra money.""We are committed to the safety of our customers and professionals, do not tolerate this type of behavior from anyone using our platform, and when alerted to the rare cases where something goes wrong, Handy management responds quickly, sensitively and effectively," Handy told Broadly. "We remove customers and/or professionals from the platform when merited by the facts, and would have removed the professional in this case."Read more: This 'Uber for Escorts' App Aims to Revamp Sex Work
The industry is simultaneously plagued by frat boy antics better associated with the tech bros on the TV comedy Silicon Valley: An Uber senior executive once suggested digging up dirt on the personal life of a female journalist who was critical of the company (he later apologized), while Airbnb stands accused of trampling over local laws with impunity. In 2014, Uber France apologized for running a promotion that promised men free rides with "an incredibly hot chick" as driver.That's the job you can fit around your children, whereas driving an Uber isn't going to mesh so well with your domestic responsibilities.
Former Harvard professor Juliet Schor specializes in the gendered economics of labor. "My sense is that there are a set of platforms that are mostly single gendered (Etsy), some that are mixed (Airbnb), some have a skew (Uber, Lyft)," she tells me over the phone. "To date I'd say that the sharing economy platforms tend to replicate the gender distribution of the larger labor market and division of labor, including non-market labor. On race, they were originally much 'whiter' than the larger labor market, but as they grow they are starting to reproduce it more. We find that on the more remunerative sites, the labor force is whiter. As you go downmarket to sites that pay less, they get more diverse racially."Read more: What It's Really Like to Live in the 'Rape Capital' of India
Though the rhetoric that underpins the sharing economy talks of inclusivity and community, dig a little deeper and you enter a world founded on the most masculine of political theories: neoliberalism. What's Yours Is Mine author Tom Slee advocates for greater regulation of the sharing economy, arguing that stripping out management and bureaucracy actually makes things more insecure and dangerous for women and minorities."It's not really fashionable to be in favour of bureaucracy and rules, but equal pay for equal work, minimum wage laws, employment standards that limit employers' right to fire at will, and anti-discrimination laws were the results of years of struggle by feminists, unionists, and anti-racism groups," he says. "I don't think they should be thrown away just because a new app has a rating system."The drawbacks of the sharing economy don't just affect consumers' safety—it also affects the workers involved. Palak Shah of the National Domestic Workers Alliance says that a rating system "can result in workers completing a job when they don't feel safe, for fear of receiving a poor rating and less work." While sharing economy platforms such as Handy aren't to blame for the job insecurity historically faced by domestic workers, "online economy companies are using legal ambiguity to take advantage of workers and maximize profits, hence the on-going cases challenging worker classification within the online economy."It's not really fashionable to be in favour of bureaucracy and rules, but equal pay for equal work… and anti-discrimination laws were the results of years of struggle.
The structure of sharing economy companies itself creates a disincentive for companies to stamp out discrimination. "Their model has two components: One is to take a slice out of every transaction in order to make money. The second component is to avoid the costs of responsibility: The platforms maintain that they are not responsible when things go wrong."Read more: This 'Uber for Escorts' App Aims to Revamp Sex Work
* Name has been changedUpdate: The feature has been updated to include a response from Handy to an incident outlined in the piece.