Digital Entrepreneurship and Gender: The Invisible Labour of Women in E-Commerce

This study analyses the invisible labour of women in the field of digital entrepreneurship through the lens of feminist economic theory, offering a multidimensional perspective on how digitalisation reproduces gender inequalities. While home-based production carried out via digital platforms offers women opportunities for economic engagement, it simultaneously renders forms of invisible labour particularly care, emotional, and aesthetic work even more obscured and deepens mechanisms of exploitation. Drawing on recent examples and policy documents from Turkey, the study highlights how women’s digital labour processes appear to be shaped by structures such as precarity, the commodification of privacy, and algorithmic inequality. The theoretical framework developed in line with feminist economic literature emphasises the need to move beyond individual success narratives and to evaluate digital entrepreneurship from a structural justice perspective. The analysis of policy documents suggests that many existing policy instruments are gender-blind and often fail to consider women’s specific conditions. While critically questioning the reproduction of invisible labour in digital contexts, the study also highlights possibilities for transformation through feminist policy recommendations such as collective solidarity, gender impact assessments, and social protection mechanisms.