Roughly 1.1m people work in Britain’s gig economy, and according to a survey carried out by Ipsos Mori and the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), 69 per cent of them are male.
(In recent years, the word gig was used to refer to a live performance by or engagement for a musician or group , but “Gig economy” work is used to describe part-time self-employed work, often office work, short tasks and ‘click work’ done online. In Britain that kind of work has tended to attract women in the past. Nowadays there is a real gender imbalance in some sectors: For example men account for 95 per cent of Uber drivers and 94 per cent of Deliveroo couriers.)