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Why Is Female Labour-Force Participation So Stagnant in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia Despite Rapid Increases in Educational Attainment?

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Why Is Female Labour-Force Participation So Stagnant in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia Despite Rapid Increases in Educational Attainment? Th e ‘Aft erlife’ of Cheap Labour: Bangalore Garment Female Employment & FEDI Dynamics of Inequality Research Network Workers from Factories to the Informal Economy FEDI Female Employment & Dynamics of Inequality Research Network WHY IS FEMALE LABOUR-FORCE PARTICIPATION SO STAGNANT IN EGYPT, JORDAN, AND TUNISIA DESPITE RAPID INCREASES IN EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT? Author(s):Ragui Assaad Country Briefing Paper No: 06.17.5 1 WHY IS FEMALE LABOUR-FORCE PARTICIPATION SO STAGNANT IN EGYPT, JORDAN, AND TUNISIA DESPITE RAPID INCREASES IN EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT? Ragui Assaad Prepared for the Project Dynamics of Gender Inequality in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund) London Conference, 9-10 June 2017 The main issue I wish to raise in this note is the puzzle of stagnant female labour-force participation rates in a context of rapidly rising educational attainment for women and a closing if not reversal of the gender gap in education. This is a phenomenon that characterizes a number of societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I will focus in this note on the situation in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. Raising women’s economic participation, is, in my view, a necessary although not sufficient condition for promoting gender equality in the economic sphere. The fact that participation rates among women in MENA are among the lowest in the world has been well established and widely discussed and is not my main concern here. I am mostly concerned with the trend in participation in relation to the trend in educational attainment. It is easy to see from cross-sectional data that a strong gradient exists between educational attainment and participation for women, leading to an expectation that participation would respond strongly to increases in educational attainment. However, this gradient has clearly weakened over time, resulting in a paltry participation response to rapidly rising educational attainment among women in MENA. I attribute the weakening relationship between female participation and education to the changing opportunity structures facing women in MENA labour markets rather than to any developments on the supply side of the labour market. In making this argument, I deliberately downplay arguments about social and economic trends that may restrict labour supply, such as a religiously-driven resurgence of social conservatism or an oil-driven re-enforcement of patriarchal norms and preferences. In fact, the evolution of the typical factors that affect labour supply behavior is, for the most part, in a direction that is conducive to higher female participation. Besides the rapid increase in educational attainment, there has been a notable delay in the age at marriage, a reduction in fertility, and improved access to urban services, household technologies and markets for time saving goods and services, all of which have undoubtedly reduced the domestic and care work burden. Admittedly, these strong secular trends may have been partly counteracted by an increased desire and ability on the part of educated women and their families to increase their investments in child human capital. In a context of such strong preferences for child quality and weak public educational inputs, parents, and mothers in particular, are forced to spend more time (and money) in assisting their children with their studies (Assaad & Krafft, 2015a). The net effect, however, is still likely to be a downward trend in the household time burden and thus greater availability for market work. 1 Since the start of the drive for the massification of education in the Arab World in the 1960s, the relationship between women’s education and their participation in market work has been intimately linked to access to public sector job opportunities. The vast majority of educated women entering the labour market in the 1960s and 1970s did so by means of public sector jobs in education, health and public administration. In Egypt, the proportion of women with secondary education or above entering the labour market who got their first job in the public sector was in excess of 80 percent until the mid-1980s. That proportion fell precipitously thereafter, falling below 40 percent by the mid-2000s (Assaad & Krafft, 2015b). Educated men entering the labour market experienced a similar if not larger decline in access to the public sector, reflecting the overall restructuring of the Egyptian economy away from state-led development since the introduction of the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s. Although they succeeded in curbing the growth of the public sector, these neoliberal reforms mostly failed to spark the growth of a dynamic private sector, leading to anemic growth of formal private sector employment. Faced with declining overall demand for their labour in the formal sector, the growing cohorts of graduates were essentially relegated to informal private employment, whose share among educated first-time job seekers grew from under 20 percent in the mid-1980s to about 45 percent by 2010 (Assaad & Krafft, 2015b). The situation in Jordan and Tunisia is fairly similar. In Jordan, the proportion of female first-time job seekers with secondary education or above getting public sector jobs was over 70 percent until the early 1980s. In Tunisia, it remained above 70 percent until the early 1990s (Assaad, Hendy, Lassasi, & Yassine, 2016). By the mid-2000s, it had dropped to just over30 percent in both countries. The main difference with Egypt is that formal private employment has played a more important role in these two countries in taking up the slack than in Egypt. The share of formal private employment grew from about 20 percent of all jobs in the early 1980s to above 40 percent by the mid-2000s in both countries. Informal private employment does not only lack any form of social or legal protection, but also tends to be concentrated in small workplaces or requires work outside fixed establishments. In addition, it often involves long work days and long commutes (Assaad & Arntz, 2005). In short, it provides working conditions that most Egyptian women and their families deem unacceptable. In an analogous notion to the reservation wage below which a worker is unwilling to accept a job offer, the minimum working conditions women are willing to accept are sometimes referred to as “reservation working conditions” (Dougherty, 2014). Similar situations apply in Jordan (Miles, 2002) and to a lesser extent in Tunisia. Unmarried women find these working conditions unacceptable because they pose excessive risks to their reputations and therefore their marriage prospects. Working in a small establishment, often without other women present, poses risks of actual sexual harassment by male bosses and co-workers, as well as a perception among family members and social circles that such risks are pervasive. This is in addition to the sexual security risks young unmarried women endure in long commutes to work in poorly-funded and poorly-secured transit systems. Young women often 2 speak of “maintaining one’s dignity” rather than exposing oneself to the risks of informal employment (Barsoum, 2004). Married women face additional challenges related to their ability to remain in informal private wage employment even if they opted to engage in such employment prior to marriage. Long work hours and long commutes come into direct conflict with unyielding domestic work burdens after marriage. Hendy (2015) shows that although domestic work burdens have fallen substantially in Egypt over time, they increase from about 13 hours per week prior to marriage to about 30 hours per week after marriage. Moreover, the domestic work burden of working and non-working married women in 2012, was virtually identical at about 30 hours per week, suggesting that employed married women have a limited ability to reallocate time from the domestic sphere to the market sphere. Domestic work burden for married women in Jordan are even heavier, averaging about 37 hours per week as compared to 17hours per week for unmarried women and, like Egypt, do not vary by work status (Assaad, Krafft, & Selwaness, 2016). They are lighter in Tunisia at 20 hours per week for employed married women compared to 24 hours per week for non-working married women (ibid.) Although systematic research on this is lacking, private sector employers, whether formal or informal, appear to be unwilling to make the necessary compromises to allow married women to reconcile their home and work responsibilities. Data on women’s participation in employment just before and just after marriage in Egypt reveals that employment rates fall by about half (from 1.6% to 0.9%) in the formal private sector at the time of marriage, and they fall by more than two thirds for informal private wage employment (from 3.4% to 1.3%). In contrast, employment rates in the public sector are scarcely affected by marriage and continue along their pre-marriage trends several years into marriage (Hendy, 2015). Rates of self-employment rise slightly after marriage, but less that what is necessary to make up for the sharp drop in private wage employment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that private employers are generally not willing to make any compromises about the length of the work day or to change other aspects of the work process, like allowing telecommuting or job sharing, to accommodate the time constraints of married women Thus, there appears the be agreement among women themselves and among employers that private sector wage work is not suitable for women after marriage. Informal private wage work, in particular, is to be avoided if at all possible. Since that is the predominant form of employment that is currently available to educated workers in Egypt, educated women essentially find themselves increasingly shut out of the labour market. While formal private employment is more common in Jordan, it is mostly of a temporary nature and appears to be equally incompatible with women’s domestic work burdens (Assaad, 2014; Assaad, Hendy, & Yassine, 2014).
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