<![CDATA[Women perform essential roles across fisheries, aquaculture, seafood processing, marine tourism, seaweed cultivation, coastal conservation, and aquatic-product trading. Nevertheless, much of their labour remains informal, statistically invisible, poorly remunerated, and weakly represented in blue-economy governance. Digital platforms are increasingly promoted as mechanisms for connecting women with information, financial services, consumers, institutions, and international markets. However, digital participation does not automatically produce gender equality. This article examines how digital platforms restructure women’s labour, social empowerment, and global market inclusion in the blue economy. It employs a structured integrative review of peer-reviewed studies and authoritative reports published primarily between 2013 and 2026. The literature was analysed through feminist political economy, gendered-organisation theory, intersectionality, and Kabeer’s resources–agency–achievements framework. Six interconnected findings emerge. First, digital technologies can make women’s previously invisible work more socially and institutionally recognisable. Second, platforms can reorganise intermediation and expand market access, while fees, logistical dependence, and algorithmic visibility may reproduce unequal value distribution. Third, economic empowerment remains conditional on women’s control over income, assets, accounts, and productive resources. Fourth, digital networks can strengthen collective agency and social capital. Fifth, unequal access to devices, skills, time, connectivity, assets, and formal business identities restricts participation, especially among rural and low-income women. Sixth, equitable global market inclusion depends on institutional protection, collective organisation, data rights, care infrastructure, and gender-responsive platform design. The article proposes a conceptual Gender-Responsive Digital Blue Economy Framework comprising access, recognition, agency, redistribution, representation, and institutional protection. It concludes that digital platforms become empowering only when technological inclusion is accompanied by structural transformation in labour relations, household responsibilities, value-chain governance, and decision-making power.]]>
