Survey of US gig workers: 92% of young women report harassment, Pew 2021 data
Authors from the University of Kentucky and Purdue analysed 2021 Pew survey data: harassment reports were higher among Black and Hispanic workers and highest among young women.
Julieta Aguilar of the University of Kentucky and Jeremy Reynolds of Purdue University published a study of harassment among gig workers in the United States on 4 November 2026 in PLoS ONE. The authors used 2021 data from the Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel, which included over 1,000 US respondents who had done gig work doi.org
PLoS ONEdoi.orgOpen source ↗. Gig work was defined as short-term jobs facilitated by an app or another online platform.
Data and measures
Respondents answered questions about their experiences since joining the gig economy: whether, and how often, they had been treated rudely, felt unsafe, or experienced an unwanted sexual advance. The authors examined the average level of harassment across these three measures doi.org
PLoS ONEdoi.orgOpen source ↗. The analysis was guided by the intersectional perspective and the perpetrator-predation framework. Because of the smaller sample size, it does not cover all race and gender identities of gig workers.
Differences by race, age and gender
Harassment levels were lowest among white workers, yet 70 percent of them reported some form of it. Among Hispanic workers the figure was 79 percent, and among Black workers 82 percent doi.org
PLoS ONEdoi.orgOpen source ↗. Black and Hispanic workers reported more harassment than white workers regardless of gender or age.
On average, women did not report more harassment than men. Among young workers, however, the link between gender and harassment was strong: young women reported notably more harassment than young men and more than any other gender-age group, and 92 percent of them reported being harassed doi.org
PLoS ONEdoi.orgOpen source ↗. According to the authors, harassment was highest for young women who were Black or Hispanic. Among older workers, gender differences were much less pronounced, and the race and ethnicity differences were less dramatic than those associated with the combined effect of age and gender.
The data did not allow a detailed split by type of gig work, but the authors found a clear distinction between online and in-person work. Only 36 respondents worked exclusively online, yet their reported harassment was low enough to be a statistically significant difference. The authors note that gig workers are typically classified as independent contractors and tend to lack the legal protections available to conventional employees.
