Digital Comparative Mobilities in Platform Economies: Gender, Disability, and the Persistence of Immobile Mobility

ABSTRACT Platform economies are widely celebrated for expanding economic opportunities without requiring workers to relocate. This literature review draws on comparative mobilities scholarship, which conceptualizes mobility as an interdependent, life‐course–situated, and sociotechnically mediated process, to examine how women and people with disabilities (PWDs)—often presumed to benefit differently from digital work—are not merely users of platforms but active co‐producers of the conditions of (im)mobility itself. By situating platform‐based (im)mobilities within a broader genealogy of mobilities research, the article develops a digital comparative mobilities framework and advances three analytical contributions. First, it redefines mobility in platform economies. By drawing on emerging digital labor research, it demonstrates that mobility is no longer defined by the physical movement of bodies across space, but by the capacity to sustain economic participation through the continuous production of visibility, responsiveness, and algorithmic legibility within platform‐governed temporal and infrastructural regimes. Second, it conceptualizes digital platforms as mobility regimes that allocate speed, waiting, visibility, and risk, thereby governing who may remain economically mobile. Third, it reframes immobile mobility as a patterned structural outcome generated through specific configurations of platform economies, including welfare‐policy arrangements, levels of technological development, and cultural contexts.