Is the solution to Egyptian women’s plight more work?

When foreigners learn that I am Egyptian, the first thing that piques their curiosity is the status of women in my country. In my response, I usually attempt to offer a brief but nuanced glimpse into the complex factors at play in Egypt, where gendered social norms are upheld by institutions beyond religion and the state, and where legal protections are circumvented by cultural practices. Recently, one foreigner prodded: “So, would the solution for Egyptian women be to work more?” I paused and wondered what assumptions, innocent from her perspective, underlay her question. Work more than what, or who, exactly?

My mind went back to an earlier conversation with several Egyptian women at one of our events, all working mothers and caretakers. I thought back to their days: the freelance crochet work, the clock-in, clock-out shift at a cosmetics store, the daily marathon through the market to buy groceries on the way to collect the kids from school, then home to cook, clean, get the children to bed, and everything else a household demands. I wondered, was this not enough work for them?

The question betrayed an array of assumptions: that Egyptian women's problem is insufficient participation in the formal economy; that an expansion of that system, on that same system's terms, is the answer. This is the white neoliberal “emancipation” narrative underpinning the dominant “development” paradigm. It either disregards care work entirely or devalues it, and in doing so compounds the very burden it claims to address.

Are Egyptian women not working enough?

The 2023 Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) indicated a decline in women’s participation in the labor market, steadily falling from 23 percent in 2012 to 18 percent in 2023. But women are not working less; they are shifting to informal and irregular work that is not included in official statistics, including gigs such as digital entrepreneurs. The public sector has been shrinking for years, with a 15 percent decrease in Egypt’s public employment budget in 2025/2026. Private sector employers frequently infringe on workers’ rights by violating minimum wage, denying them a formal contract, or refusing entitled annual leave days, fueling widespread frustration and a rise in wage strikes nationwide. And at the intersection of expanding austerity measures and the rising cost of living, women are left with fewer options but greater need for paid employment.

The informal sector makes up about 63 percent of the workforce and employs half of the working women in Egypt. But it is riddled with insecurity, instability, and vulnerability to exploitation. Informal workers face compounded risks: long hours extending beyond the legal limit, exposure to violence and harassment without any support mechanisms, and lack of safety regulations to protect workers, especially in construction and transportation.

With the evolving labor market and rising prominence of online work, home-based digital gigs have surged among women trying to make ends meet in Egypt’s economy. They turn their domestic and care knowledge into income through informal digital gigs: a cooking page that earns views on TikTok, or takes orders on Facebook.

They do this work while continuing to serve as the primary caregivers in their households, spending on average five to six times more time on care than men. Women who are both married and formally employed report the highest number of hours worked (paid and unpaid) per week, with informal private workers close behind. Home-based online gig work’s flexibility provides married women and employed mothers needed leeway, but it leaves them with less time, more stress, and reduced well-being. With the expansion of gig work, the boundaries between paid and unpaid labor are eroding.

In our discussion groups with Egyptian working women, many described how paid digital gigs and unpaid care work intertwine in the same domestic space, with no clear distinction between “this is paid work” and “this is my care work”. Time, attention, and labor flow continuously between earning income and providing care.

Care work: An act of love and drudgery

Care work sustains households and the wider economy, yet precisely because it is indispensable it is naturalized as a gendered obligation and devalued as economically unproductive. Domestic digital gigs are promoted as emancipatory under a familiar neoliberal logic that equates economic participation with empowerment. Such online gigs encompass, but are not limited to, cooking and cleaning videos, where ad revenues and views determine income, and sewing and cooking services conducted from home, facilitated by mobile applications' algorithms. Platforms are often praised as sites of innovation, but here innovation is inseparable from extraction: it converts gendered domestic labor into monetizable content and data while leaving the reproductive burden of care largely unchanged.

In this sense, platforms do not valorize care as socially necessary so much as they repackage it as visibility, with value accruing primarily to the platform rather than the laborer. Third-party digital platforms such as Meta extract value from these private, gendered spaces, transforming them into broadcast sites of precarious gig work. Here, the logic of algorithms and data reigns: viral content is prioritized, private care routines are commodified, and extractive business models skim profits through commissions and ad revenues. Entrepreneurs, creators, and other gig workers bear the risks of inconsistent visibility and burnout as this platform-centric logic further entrenches neoliberal inequalities.

Much as unpaid care work by women has long subsidized the traditional economy by enabling others to undertake waged labor outside the home, monetized gig work reinforces this dynamic in the digital realm. The traditional economy extracts unpaid labor from women indirectly, through their "breadwinner." In the digital gig economy, platforms extract it directly, from women in their own homes. Same system, just another face.

Increasing productivity is not the solution

Mainstream development narratives detached from local realities celebrate the gig economy as a breakthrough for emancipation. Yet these new forms of work, operating under the neoliberal paradigm, perpetuate many of the same risks of precarity and marginalization as the traditional economy. The primary objective is once again GDP growth rather than improving household well-being. This optimism disregards the lessons learned about the informal economy and ignores how structural inequalities persist. The focus on economically productive work narrows our valuation of other social, economic, and political endeavors. It financializes well-being and ignores the quality of the work people are expected to do.

True emancipation is not about monetizing care work. It requires that we reimagine care infrastructure holistically, through universal basic services, community-based care cooperatives, and policies that value social reproduction as the economy’s foundation. The equitable redistribution of care labor must be accompanied by repositioning the household as the central site of economic innovation and social transformation, where care work drives sustainable well-being rather than subsidizing waged labor elsewhere. This means shifting the definition of innovation from profit maximization to collective well-being, creating non-market systems of value, resource allocation, and labor organization that restructure our routines, resources, and relationships to sustain life directly. The household ceases to be a mere passive consumer, selling its labor for wages and buying goods to survive, but intentionally replaces market dependency with autonomous, regenerative systems, moving away from globalized, corporate supermarkets to local, community-organized agroecological production, decentralized energy networks and shared resource-management systems, and reimagined systems of exchange beyond monetization.

While paid platform care work may seem like an improvement over unpaid care, pay alone does not transform the gendered division of labor or the extractive conditions under which that labor is commodified. The redistribution of care labor and the provision of structural support are fundamental prerequisites for realizing any emancipatory potential of the gig economy.

When that foreigner asked me whether Egyptian women need to work more, the question itself betrayed the faulty ways in which we perceive women’s labor. What women in Egypt are already doing – inside and outside the home, paid and unpaid, formal and informal – is work. We should not be asking how we can make them do more of it. The questions we need to ask are: who benefits from their labor, who recognizes it, and who is responsible for redistributing its weight?

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.