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Is Women’s Work a Pathway to their Agency in Rural Minya, Egypt?

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Abstract

Whether work is performed for household members’ consumption (subsistence work) or for sale to others (market work), it may be an enabling resource for women’s agency, or their capacity to define and act upon their goals. The present paper asks: Do women who engage in market work have higher agency in the three domains of economic decision-making, freedom of movement, and equitable gender role attitudes, compared to those who engage in subsistence work and those who do not work? To address this question, we leverage data from a probability sample of ever-married women in rural Minya, Egypt (N = 600). We use structural equation models with propensity score adjustment to estimate the relationship between women’s work and three domains of their agency. We find no effect on gender attitudes or decision making. However, women’s subsistence and market work are associated with increasingly higher factor means for freedom of movement, compared to not working. We conclude that in rural Minya, the relationship between women’s work and their agency depends on the type of work they perform and the dimension of agency under consideration, with the rewards of market work exceeding those of subsistence work in the domain of freedom of movement alone.

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Notes

  1. The UN Sustainable Development Goals similarly identify gender equality and women’s empowerment as priorities for the post-2015 development agenda.

  2. Although the third UN Millennium Development Goal considered raising the percentage of women engaged in wage employment as an indicator of success, we do not make such an assumption here.

  3. The lack of attention to unremunerated work is especially problematic in low- and middle-income country settings, where this type of work typically accounts for a considerable share of women’s overall economic activity.

  4. These figures are drawn from the 2004 Slow Fertility Transition survey, a follow-up to the 2003 EDHS in which a subsample of the 2003 EDHS respondents was re-interviewed nationally in Egypt (Langsten & Salem 2008).

  5. The extended definition of work does not encompass the performance of domestic chores or caring for dependents, activities which labor statisticians consider to be non-economic activities if performed without pay (Yount et al. 2014).

  6. This national survey was the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) of 2006.

  7. Although Salem (2011) examines the effects of market and subsistence work, this study looked at regression associations with decision-making and not with other domains of agency.

  8. Kabeer’s (2011b) approach to the classification of women who perform work for household consumption (subsistence work) is unclear, and their agency compared to the agency of women involved in other types of work is not examined in this study.

  9. For empirical investigations of this relationship from other low- and middle-income settings, see for instance Boateng et al. (2012).

  10. Multi-dimensional poverty captures deprivations in the areas of health, education, and living standards. These figures are based on the 2011 Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Survey.

  11. In this analysis, our dependent variables are three domains of women’s agency as measured in 2012, described further in the “Data and Variables” section below.

  12. This was limited to a measure of household wealth in 2005, described further in the “Covariates” subsection below.

  13. This response rate is similar to that of other recent panel studies conducted in Egypt, including the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey of 2006 (72%), and of 2012 (77%) (Barsoum 2007; Assaad and Krafft 2013).

  14. We ran a sensitivity analysis to determine whether our results were driven by the use of different sample sizes based on the maximum number of women with complete information on the variables of interest. Using the smallest analysis sample of 580 women for all our tables, however, yielded the same substantive results (available upon request) as those we report here.

  15. All 21 items were entered simultaneously.

  16. Age was included among the variables that temporally precede work because this measure is determined by women’s date of birth, which predates their work and which cannot be influenced by their work status.

  17. Small cell sizes existed when examining combinations of certain variables, but no structural zeros. Because our propensity score approach matched on individual covariates and balance was achieved for each of them, these small cell sizes should not play a role in the results after multiple PS correction. However, we also ran a sensitivity analysis to confirm that these small cell sizes were not driving the significance of the results, and the substantive results for the three outcomes DM, FM, and GA were substantively the same as the results we report here.

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Acknowledgements

The survey that was the basis for the analysis presented here was funded by the UN Development Program and the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis Program of the World Bank (PI Dr. Kathryn Yount). The analysis was supported by a financial grant from the Economic Research Forum (PIs Dr. Kathryn Yount and Dr. Rania Salem). The contents and recommendations herein do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders. We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Kristin E. VanderEnde’s valuable contributions to earlier versions of this manuscript.  We thank Dr. Ray Langsten and Dr. Rania Roushdy for their outstanding management of the field activities. We also thank Dr. Ragui Assaad for his scientific recommendation to conduct a panel study; Ms. Tahra Hassan and Ms. Eman Shady for their assistance with typing, preparation, and translation of study documents; Ms. Amal Refaat for her training of the interviewers and supervision of the fieldwork; Mr. Ali Rashed for his assistance with data entry and management; and Ms. Sarah Shah for her help with preparation of the manuscript. Finally, we express our heartfelt gratitude to the women who participated in this study, without whom this project would not have been possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, M1C 1A4, Canada

    Rania Salem

  2. Department of Psychology, Emory University, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Yuk Fai Cheong

  3. Hubert Department of Global Health and Department of Sociology, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road NE. Room 7029, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Kathryn M. Yount

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  1. Rania Salem
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Correspondence to Rania Salem.

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Salem, R., Cheong, Y.F. & Yount, K.M. Is Women’s Work a Pathway to their Agency in Rural Minya, Egypt?. Soc Indic Res 136, 807–831 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1573-9

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