Platformed Care: Gender and Care Mobilities Across Ride-Hailing Platforms

Abstract

This article examines how ride-hailing platforms mediate care mobility in everyday contexts, focusing on women-only and mixed-gender services in Chile. Drawing on 37 qualitative interviews with users and drivers, the study shows that caregiving responsibilities are an important yet underexamined reason women engage with these platforms, highlighting the gendered organization of care-related mobility. Participants use apps to coordinate children's routines, assist elderly relatives, and manage everyday travel with limited time, resources, and support. The findings show that these practices extend beyond transport. Women drivers often perform additional unremunerated forms of care, including waiting beyond scheduled times, offering emotional support, and assisting dependents. These interactions reveal how platform-mediated mobility operates across blurred boundaries between paid service and informal care, shaped by gendered expectations around responsibility and care. The article introduces the concept of platformed care to describe how mobile media and mobility platforms are used to coordinate and delegate caregiving-related mobility under conditions of distance and gendered vulnerability. Rather than resolve structural constraints, these platforms reorganize care mobility while reproducing existing inequalities.