(Re)conceptualising precarity: a Global South feminist perspective on women gig workers’ experiences in Egypt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This commentary draws on a Global South feminist political economy approach to (re)conceptualise precarity, centring the lived experiences and knowledges of informal and invisibilised workers. Based on six months of fieldwork with 25 home-based women food vendors in Cairo’s gig economy (October 2022–March 2023), this article examines how women gig workers in Egypt’s food tech sector use their socially reproductive knowledges and relationalities to (re)define and navigate precarity in their daily work and life activities. Socially reproductive knowledges include intergenerational, experiential and reciprocal forms of knowledge embedded in everyday practices, while socially reproductive relationalities include the fluid and interconnected networks nurtured through care and household labour. The strategies women gig workers employed included financial stability grounded in spiritual faith ( rizq ), resourcefulness through cost-saving and sustainable provisioning ( tawfeer ) and the pursuit of purpose and self-actualisation ( kayan ). These strategies not only resist dominant economic frameworks but demand a rethinking of precarity itself, not as an aberration from stable labour, but as a generative space where alternative economies and solidarities are formed. Precarity is (re)conceptualised as fluid and relational, encompassing both material barriers, such as limited access to finances and tools, and non-material dimensions, including the pursuit of freedom, fulfilment and emotional security. This commentary is in conversation with round-table discussions on the global politics of insecure work and calls for policy interventions that prioritise stabilising local markets, supporting informal networks and investing in social infrastructures identified by workers themselves, including access to raw materials, childcare and protection of home-based enterprises.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".