Alveena Ahmad
A federal minister said eight million Pakistani women are now working online. That number is real, and it measures almost nothing about employment: it counts women who gained mobile internet access in 2024, not women earning from a platform. Pakistan’s actual gig economy data, published for the first time this year, tells a narrower and more interesting story about where women’s online income really comes from, and it is not the story the headline suggested.
Where the Eight Million Number Actually Comes From
Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima cited the eight-million figure as evidence of a shift toward digital employment. TechJuice traced the number back to its source and found it comes from the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025, which tracks who gained mobile internet access, not who earns money from it. The mobile internet gender gap in Pakistan did shrink meaningfully, from 38 percent to 25 percent in a single year, which is a genuine milestone. Access is not income, though, and conflating the two overstates how many women are actually being paid for online work.
What the Real Employment Data Shows Instead
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ Labour Force Survey 2024-25, the government’s first-ever count of gig and platform work, gives a more precise picture. In primary jobs, online gig work is slightly male-leaning: 3.0 percent of employed men versus 2.5 percent of employed women. Widen the lens to secondary or side-income work, and the pattern flips hard. Among people with a subsidiary job, 15.0 percent of women say it is gig-based, compared to 9.8 percent of men, according to the PBS Labour Force Survey 2024-25. Women are doing more gig work than men, just mostly as a second income, not a first one.
The Kind of Gig Work Splits By Gender Too
What women and men actually do within gig work is where the real divide sits. Sector-level data reported by Pakistan Today shows women’s gig work concentrated in teaching (39.8 percent of female gig workers) and selling goods (21.9 percent), both roles that can be run from home and fit within existing social expectations. Men dominate taxi services (20.9 percent) and delivery (14.9 percent), the mobility-heavy categories that require being out on the road. Freelancing in the narrower, tech-and-writing sense that beingguru’s readers usually mean sits inside these totals but is not broken out separately by gender in the published data, which is itself telling: the categories the state chose to measure separately were teaching, selling, driving, and delivering, not remote knowledge work.
Should You Believe the Older “Women Earn More” Claims?
Older industry data, most often a 2019 Payoneer global freelancer survey, found Pakistani women freelancers earning around 10 percent more per hour than Pakistani men, concentrated in marketing and design work. That figure predates the pandemic-era freelancing boom, predates this year’s official labour data, and was never a nationally representative government survey the way the LFS is. Treat it as a historical data point about a specific platform’s users in a specific year, not a current guarantee. What is verifiable now is participation, not the pay premium: more women are gigging, mostly on the side, mostly in teaching and selling.
What This Means If You Are a Woman Considering Freelancing
Start with the categories the data actually shows filling up: online teaching and tutoring have real, measured demand from women entering gig work, and platforms built around that, from local tutoring marketplaces to global ones, are the least socially contested entry point the numbers can point to. Selling goods online, through a WhatsApp storefront or a marketplace page, is the second-most common route and requires far less specialised training than technical freelancing. If you are aiming at the higher-paying, more competitive lanes such as design, writing, or development where global platforms operate, know that you are entering a segment the government’s own survey shows is still male-leaning at the primary-job level, which is a market gap worth exploiting, not a reason to avoid it.
Practical next steps look the same regardless of category: register with PSEB if your income crosses the reporting thresholds, choose a bank that actually handles freelance remittances well, and mark your filing dates, since Pakistan’s freelancer tax return deadline applies regardless of gender or platform. Programs like Punjab’s rural women’s IT training push are trying to widen the on-ramp, but the survey data suggests the bottleneck is not access anymore. It is which categories of work women are being funnelled toward once they are online.
