Platform Work Recognition: How Do Women Gain Recognition as Ridehailing Drivers in the Global South?

Ridehailing platforms have been promoted across the Global South as vehicles for women's economic inclusion, yet little is known about how the women who take up this work come to be valued within it. This article examines how women ridehailing drivers in Sub‐Saharan Africa gain recognition when executing platform work in this postcolonial era of consciousness‐raising. The study aims to explain how, and by whom, recognition is performed and to identify the gendered, racialized, and classed forms of oppression from which these recognition practices emerge in order to theorize the relationship between recognition and oppression in postcolonial platform work. The research is based on a case study of women ridehailing drivers in Africa, drawing on netnography and interviews. We identify four recognition practices that represent a processual outcome that can emerge from oppression, and that are performed both by workers themselves and members of the wider platform ecosystem. The article contributes to scholarship on gender and platform work by moving beyond the exploitation–resistance binary, extends recognition theory to postcolonial digital labor, and broadens understanding of transformative, bottom‐up, community‐wide approaches for addressing platform work injustices.