The Unpaid Labor of Being a Woman Online

Who Pays the Steepest Price in Social Media's Performance Economy?

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Social media has become both a workplace and a pressure cooker, especially for women balancing activism, visibility, and safety. This piece would explore the hidden costs of digital labor — from constant unpaid emotional work to navigating harassment — and argue for systemic recognition of these invisible burdens.

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Every time a woman opens her phone, she clocks in. For women, femmes, and gender expansive people, social media isn’t just an escape from the pressure of everyday life. It’s hard labor–curating posts to stay relevant, moderating comments to stay safe, and performing a constant balancing act between visibility and vulnerability. 

The internet once promised diverse voices.  Instead, it has created a marketplace where women’s presence is demanded and exploited, yet rarely compensated. The result is a form of invisible work—emotional, intellectual, and defensive labor—that mirrors what women have long done offline: underpaid, undervalued, and essential. 

The Performance Economy

Social media collapses and divides the professional and personal, demanding that women perform both at once. A picture of a nice dinner becomes content, a tweeted political opinion becomes engagement. Algorithms reward “real life” intimacy, but the labor of making daily life look effortless yet curated is exhausting. Creators are expected to commodify their routines and domestic spheres in order to stay visible. During COVID-19, this demand for authenticity intensified, fueling a surge in lifestyle, GRWM, and mommy influencer content through livestreams and reels–shot and produced by women. 

The performance economy that we all live under is extremely gendered. Women are heavily concentrated on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, where their attention and data are monetized, while the ‘aspirational labor’ the system demands remains feminized and undervalued. 

Online, likability becomes labor. Women are expected to be warm yet authoritative; for Black women, misogynoir adds an extra layer of racism to the classic double bind, inviting tone-policing and higher abuse rates. 

Black women and femmes face the additional burden to “educate” on race and culture in online spaces, often without consent or compensation. Scholars call this “epistemic exploitation” – when the explanatory burden of systemic oppression is shifted onto those who endure it.  In the wake of the George Floyd protests in June 2020, a widely shared meme spread across Twitter and Instagram. The message was clear: don’t outsource your anti-racism homework to Black people over DMs and comment threads.

The Market for Visibility

Visibility online is framed as an opportunity–followers as capital and engagement as success. But the market for influencers and content creators is neither equal nor fair. Social Media algorithms boost some voices while burying others, as sponsored posts create wealth for already privileged influencers. 

Queer and trans creators are often praised for being authentic, but are frequently suppressed when that authenticity doesn’t meet the expectations or requirements of advertiser-friendly norms. Keyword blocklists punish identity, as nearly 73% of articles from LGBTQ+ news sources get flagged by advertisers, throttling income for queer media. But the censorship isn’t limited to news outlets. In 2019, TikTok admittedly limited the reach of content from creators identified as queer, disabled, or ‘fat’ in the name of “anti-bullying”– part of a wider trend that has also seen LGBTQ+ content incorrectly filtered by YouTube’s ‘restricted mode.’.    

Influencer data reveals the deep-seated inequalities that exist within the creator economy. A 2022 IZEA report found that women dominate the influencer market, receiving a volume of 83% of brand deals, yet earning lower compensation for branded content than their male counterparts. The same report reveals that Black influencers earn, on average, 35 percent less than white influencers for the same branded collaborations. 

Black creators have expressed their concerns regarding the exploitative nature of influencer culture. As The Black Wall Street Times reported in 2022, many Black influencers find themselves tapped to shape trends—yet sidelined when it comes to pay checks and brand deals.  Notably, in 2021, Black creators staged the #BlackTikTokStrike to protest uncredited appropriation of TikTok dancing trends and unequal compensation for the same content as White creators. 

Women–especially Black women and POC–are expected to perform on demand, while their culture, style, and commentary are appropriated by companies and platforms that cash in on their labor. The content is theirs, but the profit is not.  

Emotional Moderation as Labor

For women and gender expansive content creators, increased visibility comes with the added burden of navigating the complex social dynamics of digital platforms. Beyond producing content, they monitor notifications, anticipate changes in algorithms, and preempt criticism before posting. Hours are spent responding to messages, managing followers, and blocking trolls across feeds and DMs. When they speak openly about harassment—whether in a YouTube video or an Instagram Live—they often face the added burden of justifying their response to avoid further backlash.

A stark example came in 2020, when beauty YouTuber NikkieTutorials was blackmailed by trolls threatening to reveal her transgender identity.  Rather than let others weaponize her story, she anticipated them by coming out to her followers in a video that has since been viewed millions of times. Her disclosure was deeply personal, yet it was also a defensive act—an emotional performance of authenticity forced by online manipulation.

This is classified as emotional labor, but digital platforms rarely name it as such. Traditional emotional labor describes how workers—often women and people of color—are expected to manage their emotions and presentation in service roles, shaped by racialized and gendered expectations. In digital spaces, this extends into digital emotional labor, where women are pressured to engage with harassment or ignorance in “appropriate” and emotionally regulated ways to protect their social and professional standing.

This expectation echoes what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described in her landmark book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983): “The gendered demand to smooth over interactions, to make others feel comfortable, to regulate not just one’s own emotions but the emotional climate of a space.” Social media has become an amplifier of real-world dynamics, placing the burden of moderating social interactions and smoothing over conflicts squarely on the shoulders of women–both online and offline.  

This digital mental burden mirrors the “second shift” that many women experience in their offline lives, where they juggle professional commitments alongside an additional load of unpaid domestic responsibilities. Social media introduces a “third shift”: the necessary yet often overlooked task of managing one's digital presence. 

Safety as Unpaid Labor

Being safe online or in any digital space is not free. Women often find themselves using up time and resources blocking accounts, changing privacy settings, reporting abuse, or opting out of  digital spaces altogether. Research shows that while men and women encounter harmful content online at similar rates, women face greater risks of targeted abuse such as stalking, cyberflashing and sextortion leading to stronger psychological impacts and higher use of safety tools. These risks directly reduce women’s comfort with online participation raising concerns about equitable access to digital public discourse.

Pew Research Center’s 2021 survey found that 40% of women under 35 had experienced sexual harassment online.  But for some women, the risk doesn’t stay online.  The harassment campaigns of Gamergate in 2014 showed how coordinated threats became tools to silence vocal female creators within the Gaming Industry. The harassment became so severe that Anita Sarkeesian—one of the main targets of the Gamergate campaign—was forced to flee her home after receiving credible death threats.  More recently, Wired exposed a Telegram channel targeting women from the “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook group, where non-consensual intimate images were circulated alongside doxxing and other forms of harassment.

Reframing the Discussion

The typical response to criticisms is: “If it’s so detrimental, simply log off.” However, this perspective fails to grasp the complexities of digital existence. For numerous women, femmes, and individuals with diverse gender identities, social media is essential. It serves as a platform for career development, ongoing activism, and community engagement. Choosing to log off equates to forfeiting access to influential networks, visibility, and potential income.

Rather than encouraging women to disengage, we need to acknowledge their digital contributions as legitimate work. Social media platforms must be held responsible for establishing safer environments through enhanced harassment protections, transparency regarding influencer compensation, and algorithm audits aimed at identifying bias. Companies should cease taking advantage of the creative and emotional efforts of marginalized creators without providing fair remuneration.

We can collectively challenge the misconception that visibility comes without cost. Each post stems from countless unseen hours dedicated to care, safety, and effort performed by women without recognition. Acknowledging this labor is the initial step toward appreciating its significance. But until platforms and brands pay for the labor they demand, women’s online presence will remain a form of digital exploitation disguised as opportunity.