Navigating Socio-Economic Transitions: Experiences of Chinese Women in Ride-Hailing Services

This study explores the transition experiences of women into ride-hailing work in Suzhou, China. It focuses on their motivations for entering the occupation, their transition into platform work, and the challenges they face in a male-dominated sector. A qualitative design was adopted, using semi-structured interviews with fourteen (14) women ride-hailing drivers recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. The findings from the thematic analysis show that flexibility and income generation were the key motivations for entering ride-hailing work. However, women's transition into this work was shaped by mixed family and societal reactions, technological adaptation, and limited formal training. Although ride-hailing offered some scheduling flexibility, it did not eliminate work-family tensions; instead, participants reported guilt, pressure, and difficulties in managing household responsibilities. Women also faced persistent challenges related to safety, gender bias, unstable income, and lack of social protection. The study concludes that women's participation in ride-hailing in Suzhou reflects a complex form of labour market adaptation in which flexibility, opportunity, and autonomy coexist with insecurity, gendered risk, and continuing domestic expectations. The findings indicate that women's labour market participation cannot be understood in isolation from household dynamics. The study provides some policy directions, while acknowledging that policies or platform interventions that rely solely on financial safety and flexibility may be insufficient and likely miss the ongoing significance of care responsibilities and gendered expectations in shaping women's working lives, particularly in specific localities such as Suzhou.