Beyond delineating what we claim to know about the actual economic situation of women in Egypt and Tunisia before and after the uprisings of 2010-2011, there looms the question of how observers and agents of change define women&rsquo;s economic &ldquo;empowerment&rdquo; and what purposes are served by the changes they propose to improve it.
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Access-based vs transformative empowerment</h3>
Access-based empowerment is the preferred paradigm for international financial and development assistance agencies, aiming to increase women&rsquo;s integration into an existing set of institutions in a capitalist market economy, including the labor market, the professions, business and entrepreneurial activity. To this end, women need to be remodeled into rational economic calculators with marketable skills, productivity-enhancing commitment to hard work, and competitive business acumen. On the micro level, the individual woman pursues her own economic empowerment for the well-being of herself and her family, while on the macro level a significant number of such individual pursuits presumably add up to efficiency gains in both productivity and output growth on a national and even a global scale.
Transformative empowerment is an alternative feminist paradigm, whose advocates promote challenges to the existing inequitable system from below. Narrowly defined economic access by women in the neoliberal era, they argue, contributed more to profits of corporate employers than to empowering working women or raising the standard of living of their families. Transformative feminists stress collective or community-based action over the individual pursuit of economic status, and the dismantling of institutions that entrench and solidify economic stratification and inequitable access to resources and power. They also stress that economic programs need to respect cultural and societal differences from country to country, rural to urban, and class to class.
The relevance of the access-based vs transformative empowerment concepts can be illustrated by two case studies of programs for female empowerment in Egypt. The pilot Conditional Cash Transfer programs in Egypt in 2009-2010 were found to work more effectively than earlier or contemporaneous piecemeal programs like microfinance or healthcare delivery alone. They included but did not insist upon economic activity, while providing integrated full service support to women and their families in their communities, building on local social solidarity and effecting transformative changes like keeping daughters in school.
In comparison, the &ldquo;Neqdar Nesharek&rdquo; program, which was run from 2011 to 2014 in rural Upper Egypt by the Population Council and funded by USAID, aimed to prepare young women to join the labor force as either paid workers or entrepreneurs by training them in both the vocational and social skills they needed to operate outside of their home environment. A <a href="https://www.popcouncil.org/uploads/pdfs/2014PGY_NeqdarNesharekFinalReport.pdf">preliminary evaluation</a> toward the end of program&rsquo;s run was optimistic about its potential success. A more <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/documents/publication/wcms_575930.pdf">systematic evaluation</a> steered by the ILO in 2017 found that the program had measurable success in one dimension, encouraging young women to try to start their own local businesses, especially if they were grounded in a supportive community and did not have to travel far. However, the program did not have measurable success in getting a significant number of participants out into the paid labor force or in moderating the conservative and restrictive social dynamics in the home between the young women and their spouses and families, that is, it did not have a transformative impact.
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Changing markets &amp; women&rsquo;s labor force participation</h3>
&nbsp;In both Egypt and Tunisia after 2011, women&rsquo;s labor force participation remained low and unemployment remained high by international standards, especially for young women and university graduates, thus keeping idle a large proportion of potential contributors to measured economic output. As of 2018, the official labor force participation rates of working-age women in Egypt and Tunisia were 23 and 24 percent, respectively (as compared to about 56 percent for the United States, for example). The unemployment rate for all females aged 15 and above was 23.1 percent in Egypt, 22.6 percent in Tunisia, while the unemployment rate for young females, aged 15-24, was 44.2 percent in Egypt and 36.8 percent in Tunisia, both showing improvement from the staggering rates of 2011-2012, but still among the highest in the world.
Economists posit that women&rsquo;s choices about fertility interact with the &ldquo;opportunity cost&rdquo; of their time in paid work &ndash; simply put, if decent paid work is less available, women are likely to bear more children. On the &ldquo;demand&rdquo; side of the labor market, these interactions have changed as the structure of society changed in Egypt and Tunisia from the era of state-led development and &ldquo;state feminism&rdquo; through the shift to neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. It is well documented that women in Egypt were integrated into the paid labor force during the era of state-led development, mainly in the public sector, including industry, the civil service and the professions, and that they seemed willing and able to manage this role as well as familial obligations.&nbsp;In Tunisia as of the mid-2000s, women held about 39 percent of civil service positions, about a quarter of those in managerial posts, and constituted over half of primary school teachers, almost half of secondary school teachers, 40 percent of university professors, 42 percent of physicians, 57 percent of dental surgeons, and 72 percent of pharmacists.
With the advent of neoliberalism and structural adjustment, the public sector component on the demand side was shrunk while the formal private sector demand for women&rsquo;s labor did not expand in the same proportion. The result was stagnation in the rate of female labor force participation, unemployment, especially among young women, and the growth of the informal sector. Observers were surprised to see fertility and population growth rates increase in the 2000s, reversing long-term trends in both Egypt and Tunisia. Since about 2014, these rates have slowed slightly but stabilized at levels comparable to the late 1990s.
The &ldquo;supply side&rdquo; of participation in the labor market is affected by a complex mix of cultural and social as well as economic factors. One <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17938120.2018.1443605">study</a> of data from the 2012 labor force survey in Egypt found that a woman&rsquo;s decision about whether to engage in economic activity was not determined solely by individual choice but also by the characteristics of her community as well as by her own and her mother&rsquo;s education. Another <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-016-9357-6">study</a>, based on data from the Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey for the years from 1992 to 2014, found a statistically significant inverse correlation between a woman&rsquo;s level of education and fertility, but the intervening mechanism was not a change in women&rsquo;s preferences as they became more educated. It was rather that more years of schooling led women to marry later, leaving fewer years in which to bear and raise children.
Observing that fertility in Egypt had risen to 3.5 percent in 2014, one researcher constructed a longitudinal study of the data on 3795 ever-married women of childbearing age (15-49 years old) from the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Surveys. The surprising finding was that women who had more agency in household decision-making about life choices (her own and those of other members of the household) had more children on average than women with less authority in the household. The author suggested that over the course of the 2000s, in a context in which pension and social security systems were non-existent or in decline, women might choose to have more children to ensure that they will be cared for in old age. Furthermore, women understood that the &ldquo;opportunity cost&rdquo; of having children is reduced when the labor market becomes less welcoming to women and remuneration too low. They may well engage in informal economic activity close to home while making a rational choice not to join the formal labor force.
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Pondering Questions</h3>
Other relevant factors include cultural and familial attitudes and expectations, the prevalence of intimate partner violence, the nature of women&rsquo;s vocational training, differential aspects of gender development and gender inequality in other spheres, and the debate over the usefulness of microfinance and entrepreneurship in empowering women. Potential policy recommendations could focus on either access-based or transformative empowerment. To what extent would more generous support for elders and broader access to daycare and preschool encourage women to work outside the home? How might government have to change, monitor and enforce updated rules in both public and private sectors in order to improve job training, opportunity for advancement, work hours and working conditions for women, especially women with families? Should policy makers think of women&rsquo;s work as a utilitarian contribution to economic growth or as a critical feature of human and societal transformation in the broader sense?
<hr>
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