Flexible Choice or No Choice: Navigating Life Course and Platform Flexibility Among Female Platform‐Based Food Delivery Workers in Taiwan

Although platform‐based work is celebrated for its flexibility and autonomy, enabling women to manage their own schedules across the work–life nexus, there is a limited understanding of how women of different life stages navigate work–life balance and their long‐term work prospects. This study investigates how life course shapes women's experiences in platform‐based food delivery. Drawing on qualitative studies with female platform food delivery couriers in Taiwan, this study uncovers that women's lived experiences and strategies for negotiating work–life flexibility in platform food delivery are centered around two mechanisms of time management: (1) life course flexibility and (2) platform‐based flexibility. These two flextime mechanisms create a flexibility paradox that gives women the impression of having greater personal freedom, more control over earnings, and enhanced gender autonomy in platform gig work, thus making some willing to compromise work precarity. It also shows that age and life stages greatly shape how women negotiate work–life balance in platform‐based employment. This study emphasizes the critical need to examine work–life flexibility in connection with life course and gender inequalities in the labor market.