Heba Mohamed, 35, could not sustain a full-time job following her divorce since she had to take care of her two children. Yet she was also in need of an income to make ends meet. She thought of using her skills and carving out a niche for herself by preparing and selling homemade meals.
Social media provided an ideal platform to promote her homemade food business, enabling her to reach customers and generate income while working from home.
“It all started with a single order,” Mohamed told Al-Ahram Weekly. “The number of my customers then grew fast until home cooking had developed into a main source of livelihood.”
“For me, home cooking is convenient, but the problem is that it remains unstable,” Mohamed said. “My business stops when, for instance, I get ill or when the price of an ingredient shoots up and demand declines. Such issues can put my income-generating business to a sudden halt until resolved.”
Mohamed’s story sheds light on the paradox underlying digital employment. Whereas digital platforms provide opportunities, they still lack the most basic elements of job security.
There is no doubt that the digital economy has provided a convenient platform for many Egyptian women seeking an income and work from home. Thousands of women have been creating pages and groups on social media sites to sell household products, handicrafts, food, clothing, and cosmetics, taking advantage of the flexibility offered by such digital platforms.
But the devil is in the details, and behind this apparent economic empowerment stands a more complex reality. Many women have entered the digital economy out of necessity rather than choice, only to find themselves in an unregulated labour market lacking legal and social protections.
According to data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) issued in March 2026, women’s labour force participation in Egypt rose to 20.7 per cent in 2025, compared to 16.9 per cent in 2024. The female unemployment rate fell to 15.3 per cent, down from 17.1 per cent the previous year, while the employment rate increased to 17.5 per cent from 14 per cent. The data also show that women in permanent jobs accounted for 85 per cent of total female employment.
Official data provide positive indicators regarding women employment, but it falls short of providing a tally of those involved in the digital economy. It is hard thus to know the scale of women’s involvement in online jobs.
Meanwhile, many activists insist that gender remains a workplace barrier. Available labour market data in Egypt indicate that women’s participation in the labour force is still limited compared to men, which also explains why more women are seeking online employment.
But although there has been remarkable growth in women’s participation in the digital economy, no official statistics are available to support the argument. The number of females participating in online work, whether as saleswomen, freelancers, or remote employees, remains largely unknown, which immediately reflects the informal nature of this employment sector.
Although Egypt has made significant progress in advancing women’s economic empowerment, there is broad consensus that women working in the digital economy still require clearer policies that recognise their work and protect them from economic, legal, and digital risks.
At the same time, the legislative framework should better regulate women’s participation in online work by ensuring access to decent, secure, and sustainable employment, along with the legal protections and labour rights to which they are entitled.
CHALLENGES: The absence of any figures documenting women’s participation in the digital economy is perhaps an indication of a wider range of risks that this economy involves, particularly in the case of women.
“Women working on digital platforms may encounter financial and personal risks,” said Hatem Gaafar, president of the Court of Appeal and an expert in cybersecurity and digital evidence at the Judicial Training Academy at the Arab League.
“On the financial level, sales pages can be hacked, resulting in the theft of customers, money, or personal data,” Gaafar said. “Fraud is also widespread on these platforms, often through fake payment confirmations or insecure payment gateways. On the personal level, women face the risks of online harassment, cyber-extortion, and identity theft through the creation of fake accounts or pages in their names.”
A range of social, economic and technical factors can make women generally more vulnerable to various forms of digital violence than men.
“Many women may, for instance, refrain from reporting abuse for fear of stigma, while others simply do not know how to approach platform protection tools,” Gaafar explained. “Meanwhile, many women are financially dependent on platform work and cannot dispense with their online-job income, which makes them easier to manipulate.”
Amany Gamal, the owner of a page selling women’s products, is a case in point. Gamal told the Weekly that her three-year-old business page was hacked and that her repeated attempts to recover her lost account through the platform’s management remained useless.
“It was frustrating to lose everything I had built overnight,” Gamal lamented. “I had to restart from scratch because I simply have no other source of income.”
Gamal said that “although e-commerce provides women with wide opportunities to earn an income, it does not offer any employment contracts, health or social insurance, or pensions.” In the meantime, she added, “online jobs do not provide effective protection from harassment or digital extortion.”
Kawthar Hassan, the owner of a commercial page, agreed. She said that “digital jobs are subject to the authority of online platforms, which can suspend, restrict, or permanently close accounts without transparent procedures or effective compensation mechanisms.”
According to Hassan, many women online do not seek commercial or tax registration due to the administrative complexities of the process and also to avoid the financial dues following such registration. But this, she warned, “places them in a legal grey area, leaving them without guarantees, rights, or a stable future career.”
According to Gaafar, hacking an electronic sales page does not only result in “a mere financial loss”.
“It can also lead to the loss of reputation, customers, and the entire source of income,” Gaafar said. “Licensed electronic payment methods provide a good level of security, but sharing bank card data or dealing with undocumented transfers remains risky.”
Digital illiteracy poses a further challenge to women engaged in platform businesses. “Many women lack awareness about digital security issues,” Gaafar noted, explaining that “a significant proportion of women engaged in online work do not know how to enable two-factor authentication or identify fraudulent links, for example.”
“Many women are also reluctant to report cybercrime,” he added.
SOLUTIONS: There is almost a consensus among cybersecurity experts that the first step towards combating digital fraud is to increase awareness among female cyber-employees about the mechanisms they can use to protect themselves on business platforms.
“The most important practical steps online workers should take are to use long, complex passwords that do not contain personal information, change them regularly, enable two-factor authentication, and keep records of every transaction, including notifications, receipts and conversations,” Gaafar said.
“They should also document any attempted fraud in detail. In emergencies, they can report incidents through the Internet Investigations hotline (108), the National Council for Women hotline (15115), or other official reporting channels.”
According to Gaafar, technology already provides tools to protect online workers and support victims of hacking and fraud. However, these tools are often difficult to access and are not tailored to the needs of small online sellers or users with limited digital experience. Although platforms offer mechanisms for reporting abusive content and for restoring accounts and managing privacy settings, immediate support in Arabic is almost non-existent, and most response channels take days to reply.
“There are no dedicated and fast channels to deal with digital frauds and recover the hacked sales pages,” Gaafar explained. Moreover, “the platforms lack transparency and do not reveal the number of reported cases in Egypt and the Arab countries.”
A few promising initiatives have emerged to address the issue at the Arab and global levels, but further efforts are needed, Gaafar said.
Whereas some specialised women’s networks have been providing digital security guidelines, those initiatives demand institutional support and funding to be made accessible to everyone.
Today, digital crimes targeting women engaged in online businesses can be addressed through three main channels. The first involves the domestic authorities, such as the Internet Investigations Department and the National Telecom Regulatory Authority, which investigate online fraud by tracing suspicious phone numbers and digital wallets.
The second relies on digital platforms, which allow users to report abusive content and request account restoration. The third is the legal system. Egypt’s Cybercrime Law (Law 175/2018) criminalises a wide range of online offences, including hacking, extortion and identity theft, and provides legal protections for victims. Offenders face penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment and substantial fines.
The legal system is making headway in tracking and criminalising cases of digital extortion. Issues related to the theft of sales accounts, however, remain more challenging. In addition to slow procedures, it can be difficult to prove such frauds, sometimes due to the reluctance of victims to report them for fear of social stigma.
Despite these challenges, Gaafar said that “more than LE100 million has recently been recovered for victims of online fraud.” This, he added, “reflects improvements in investigation and rapid asset-freezing mechanisms. Serious enforcement efforts and enhancing the efficiency of law enforcement personnel remain among the most important safeguards against cybercrime.”
LEGISLATION: Mohamed Mahmoud Mahran, a professor of public international law, laments the legislative vacuum digital platforms offer to female workers.
“The traditional employment relationship is based on wages, dependence, and working for an employer, whereas many women working on social media platforms do so independently, without contracts or direct employers,” he said, adding that “this places them outside the full protection of the labour law.”
Mahran notes that a new law came into effect in September 2025. Law 14/2025 marks a significant development in Egyptian labour legislation by recognising, for the first time, emerging forms of employment, including remote work, part-time work, and self-employment, in accordance with its Article 96.
However, despite this legislative progress, the law requires a written employment contract specifying the rights and obligations of both parties.
“In practice, this requirement remains difficult to satisfy for many workers engaged in digital platform and other non-standard forms of employment, who often lack formal contractual arrangements,” Mahran said.
Under Egypt’s income tax laws, online business startups, including businesses that market and sell products through social media platforms, are required to register for income tax. Furthermore, they must register for value added tax (VAT) once their annual turnover exceeds LE500,000.
“Many women working online thus work outside the legal framework because they lack legal awareness and fear the procedures involved,” Mahran told the Weekly.
“This leaves them without any legal protection, and without registration they cannot obtain any bank financing or social and health insurance. They are also left without any legal defence tools, and that leaves them vulnerable in case they need to prove legal accountability or resolve a commercial dispute.”
Current legislation remains inadequate in cases where business accounts are hacked, even when such accounts are the only source of income for their owner. Legislative projects to regulate work on social media platforms in Egypt do not include clear-cut mechanisms to protect workers in informal e-commerce or compensate them in case of an account loss.
“The draft law regulating social media platforms, announced in April 2026, obliges foreign platforms to establish an official headquarters in Egypt and appoint an accredited legal representative,” Mahran elaborated.
“But the draft does not include any clear clauses to protect women workers in informal e-commerce through these platforms.”
HIGHER RISKS: According to recent international reports, women’s online jobs face higher risks than men’s. The reports indicate that some algorithms used in advertising and recruitment may indirectly reproduce forms of discrimination against women.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) is preparing an international framework that guarantees decent working conditions for those engaged in digital jobs in an attempt to organise the rapid growth of this informal sector across the globe.
The ILO suggests that the number of people working through digital platforms ranges between 154 and 435 million around the world. Women, it says, represent a large percentage of such digital employment, especially in regions where women face challenges in accessing the traditional labour market.
A recent ILO report titled “Generative Artificial Intelligence, Occupational Segregation and Gender Equality” warns that 29 per cent of female employees, compared to only 16 per cent of their male counterparts, are already at risk of losing their jobs to AI automation.
The platform economy may similarly be challenging to women seeking online jobs since, according to Mahran, “smart recruitment platforms show a clear bias against women.”
“Experiments on the Meta platform have shown that algorithms can deny women access to job ads in the field of science and technology in favour of men,” Mahran told the Weekly. “This seems to reproduce gender discrimination under the guise of technological modernity.”
In December 2024, the European Union adopted its Directive 2024/2831, requiring member states to implement its provisions by 2 December 2026. The directive aims at improving online working conditions, presuming that workers on digital platforms are employees rather than independent contractors, unless the platform can prove otherwise.
As employees, digital workers are entitled to employment rights under national law, including minimum wages, social security, and protection against unfair dismissal.
In the same vein, the ILO is working on drafting a new international standard on decent work in the digital platform economy. The organisation held its 113th international conference in June 2025 to discuss a draft convention and a recommendation in this regard, issuing its second report titled “Achieving Decent Work in the Platform Economy” in the same year.
According to this report, digital work has grown fivefold over the past decade, involving 154 to 435 million workers globally. The platform economy, the report says, now constitutes between 4.4 per cent and 12.5 per cent of the global workforce.
Women represent 42 per cent of the global cross-platform workforce, compared to 39.7 per cent female employees involved in the traditional workforce. The report maintains that the digital economy attracts women out of necessity rather than free choice.
Although those initiatives could make headway, the paradox, according to Mahran, remains in the fact that although the digital economy was supposed to emancipate women by providing them with greater financial independence, its mechanisms have actually increased their fragility, exposing them to growing risks in an unrecognised labour market that does not provide any legal protection.
Mahran explained that “although Egypt has maintained a score of 100 in the World Bank’s Gender Equality Index in Laws for the third consecutive year and allocated LE294.85 billion to promoting women’s economic empowerment between 2020 and 2025, these legislative and financial achievements have not yet translated into effective protection for working women in the digital sphere.”
As digital technologies become increasingly integrated into the workplace, many women continue to face online harassment, cyber-violence, privacy violations, and other forms of digital abuse with limited legal and institutional safeguards, according to Mahran.
“This gap between legislative progress and practical implementation underscores the need for stronger enforcement mechanisms and comprehensive policies that ensure a safe and inclusive digital working environment for women,” he concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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