• Eureka Foong Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College (Visiting Researcher in the CoEx Lab at Carnegie Mellon University) , The University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

The online gig economy has the potential to mitigate gender inequities in the workplace by providing flexible, remote, short-term opportunities to find paid work. However, prior work suggests women ask for lower hourly pay rates than men in online freelance marketplaces. Several factors could explain these gaps, such as gender “likability” biases that penalize women for more assertive behaviors, like negotiation, and differences in how men and women evaluate their worth. In this talk, I will discuss results from a design-based research study to understand challenges female freelancers perceive in rate-setting and negotiation online. My team completed 19 participatory design workshops with online female freelancers from 13 countries. I highlight opportunities to design tools that promote gender equity in online negotiation and rate-setting by mitigating fears over global competition, ambiguity in negotiation norms, and challenges building trustworthy client relationships at distance.

Eureka Foong, PhD, is a computer scientist and design researcher of equity and online work. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College in the University of Tokyo and a Visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, she has been awarded numerous international grants from the Segal Design Institute and Adobe Research to conduct research on remote work and the online gig economy. Eureka has extensive experience leading socially impactful user experience (UX) projects with industry teams at Facebook and Piktochart. www.eurekafoong.com