Female Labour Force Participation and the Care Economy: The Case of Egypt

Almadhi, Buthaina Ali

Abstract

According to official data sources, The MENA region has one of the lowest recorded female labour force participation rates (FLFPR) in the world, averaging 20.2% in 2022 (World Bank, 2024).There is no scarcity in research that attempts to understand the factors behind this, much of which has focused on the role of education, marriage, and cultural constraints on the ‘supply-side’ while others demonstrated the importance of demand-side factors and macro-level variables such as labour laws and the particular structural transformation of countries in the MENA region. With time, however, a “paradox” has emerged – namely the lack of responsiveness of the FLFPR despite the general improvement in factors previously identified in the literature as being determining factors of the FLFPR (Assaad et al., 2020). This paradox has encouraged the expansion in consideration of other variables that were not traditionally explored in the literature, with the role of care and unpaid work gaining particular attention. So far, the general narrative in the literature is that given the severe uneven gendered distribution of unpaid care work responsibilities in the region, women are faced with a binary between unpaid care work at home versus paid work outside the home. The uneven burden of care shouldered by women then results in their low and stagnant FLFP rate. Investment towards the expansion of the care economy is thus being widely proposed as a means to facilitate women’s increased labour force participation. However, many important elements of this supposed relationship and binary between paid and unpaid work are yet to be explored. The literature is still missing a detailed mapping of how care is organised on the ground in MENA countries. Without understanding how care is organised it is impossible to confidently conclude how this affects women’s work-related decisions. The other missing angle in the literature is the lack of acknowledgment and analysis of the level of heterogeneity among women in the MENA region so that current analyses tend to treat women as a homogenous group in terms the factors determining FLFP. With these gaps in mind, the contribution of this thesis is two-fold. First, it attempts to provide an overview of how care is organised in a case study MENA country, Egypt, focusing on childcare as a crucial element of the care economy. It then reassesses how childcare affects women’s participation decisions, but with an added layer of analysis: class. Thus, providing a deeper – duallayered – analysis of this relation. To address pre-existing gaps and achieve the objectives set out, the thesis incorporates a mixed methodology approach. Labour Market surveys (ELMPS) are quantitatively analysed in the first instance, and semi-structured interviews then provide a new source of information to address questions that do not currently have adequate quantitative measures. The results of this thesis highlight the importance of considering the intersectionality of variables. We find that class structures affect both how childcare is organised as well as how childcare affects women’s participation decisions. We find that commodified childcare mainly exists in the form of nurseries in Cairo and that these are relatively widespread in quantity and available at all price points. Consequently, we find that while the lack of support for affordability persists and hinders people’s access to high quality childcare services, it does not mean that households are not utilising any form of childcare services, 4 which is particularly true for lower-class households. Rather, the findings also show that the current narrative in the literature (i.e. that childcare influences women’s participation in the labour market) is mainly representative of women from the middle-class groups. On the contrary, the lack of access to affordable and good quality childcare options is not necessarily a determinant of FLFP for lower-income groups, instead it is the women’s participation status that dictates what childcare is used. It is also not a direct influencer of FLFP decisions for women from wealthier groups as their decisions are strongly steered by each choice’s ability to act as a social status marker in society. Overall, the implications of these results are that investments towards the expansion of the care economy may not yield the expected effect on the FLFP rate that is born out of the current narrative in the literature. Instead, this thesis serves as a reminder to consider the heterogeneity of populations and the need to expand policies to accommodate the realities of different target groups.

Citation

Almadhi, B. A. Female Labour Force Participation and the Care Economy: The Case of Egypt. (Thesis). SOAS University of London

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: May 15, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: May 15, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00463224
• Additional Information: 148 pages
• Award Date: Jan 1, 2025