What's Cooking? Women's Home-Based Gig Work, Social Reproduction and Development in Egypt

Abstract

This dissertation examines the everyday lives and labour of informal home-based women gig workers in Egypt’s emerging food tech economy. Drawing on six months of fieldwork with 25 women food vendors in Greater Cairo, it centers the lived experiences, socially reproductive knowledges, and relational strategies that shape how women navigate, sustain, and (re)imagine work under conditions of digitalization, economic precarity, and neoliberal development agendas. In Egypt, as in broader global policy circuits, women’s “empowerment” is increasingly framed through market-based solutions: formalization, entrepreneurship, upskilling and digital/financial inclusion. The dissertation asks: How is home-based labour integrated into the gig economy, and what does this reveal about binaries of paid/unpaid and production/reproduction in the digital domain? How do women experience and navigate precarity in informal, home-based gig work? In what ways does home-based gig work shape women’s economic participation and agency? In response, I propose ‘stretching’ social reproduction as a feminist analytical approach grounded in the specific context of Egypt and the SWANA region. This approach reorients labour analysis towards everyday life and household economies as critical yet invisibilized sites of participation, innovation, and feminist world-making. The dissertation develops three empirical interventions. First, it shows how women integrate into gig work through intergenerational skill transmission, experiential learning, reciprocal knowledge-sharing networks, and relational market-making organized through trust and obligation. Second, it conceptualizes precarity as a lived, household-embedded condition shaped by inflation, price volatility, irregular demand, and exclusion from formal supports, and analyzes women’s household hustling strategies, including spiritual grounding through rizq, informal financial practices (including gam’eyas), low-capital operations, and logistical planning that stabilizes volatility. Third, it argues that home-based gig work expands participation by transforming the household into a workspace while making it conditional on gendered moral expectations that can invisibilize and devalue women’s labour. Against narrow entrepreneurial metrics, women articulate value through nafas, kayan, and istiqlal, and sustain participation through relational agency. The dissertation contributes to feminist political economy, digital labour studies, and gender and development by offering a grounded rethinking of labour and economic justice from the Global South.