The digital revolution has reshaped the entrepreneurship landscape, with e-commerce emerging as a powerful tool for business growth and market expansion. While e-commerce presents a unique opportunity to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs in emerging nations, potentially circumventing traditional barriers to business ownership, the promise of digital equality remains unfulfilled. Women entrepreneurs in these regions often lag their male counterparts in e-commerce adoption and success, highlighting a critical digital skills gap that contributes to persistent gender disparities. Drawing on existing literature from gender studies, digital entrepreneurship, and information systems, we propose the Digital Skills Empowerment Framework for Women in E-commerce (DSEWE). This framework integrates three key theoretical perspectives: the Technology Acceptance Model extended to incorporate gender-specific factors, Social Cognitive Theory with emphasis on self-efficacy and outcome expectations, and the Capability Approach examining how digital skills enhance women’s entrepreneurial freedoms and capabilities. The DSEWE framework posits that women’s engagement in e-commerce entrepreneurship is shaped by the interplay of individual factors, sociocultural factors, and structural factors, with digital skills serving as a critical mediating factor that influences how these elements translate into e-commerce participation and success. Our framework identifies four essential dimensions of digital skills for e-commerce success: technical proficiency, digital marketing and customer engagement, online financial and business management, and digital security and risk management. The DSEWE framework offers comprehensive understanding of problems and opportunities in empowering women e-commerce entrepreneurs by illustrating interactions among skill dimensions, individual characteristics, sociocultural influences, and structural elements, providing both theoretical contributions to gender in digital entrepreneurship literature and practical implications for policymakers designing effective interventions.