Investigation of the Determinants of Female Participation in the Labor Market in Egypt

A thesis submitted to the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Political Science in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the M.Sc. Degree in EconomicsThe objective of the study is to investigate the determinants of female labor force participation in Egypt. The study used the statistical descriptive method to conclude the macro-level determinants, while the Binary Logistic Regression model and Multinomial Logistic Regression model were used to define the micro-level determinants. The results suggest that the improvements in maternal and reproductive health in addition to the gender parity achieved in the basic education’s enrollment ratio increased the female participation rate in the period 2000-2014. Yet, females’ participation is still below the world’s average, due to high levels of fertility, increased drop-out rates of females from secondary education and lower health quality due to malnutrition. The study also finds that females’ employment in economic sectors with low-share in GDP, high female unemployment rate, wage and occupational segregation, low political participation and inflexibility of labor law articles reduced female labor force participation rate. The study concludes that females’ decision to participate in the labor force is positively affected by some variables including parents’ level of education, females’ university and post university education, marriage, females’ real monthly wage, females’ age at marriage, husbands’ level of education and medical insurance coverage and sick leave. While, the relation is negative in the variables: fathers’ and husbands’ employment stability and formality, number of working hours, households’ level of wealth, household size and husbands’ real monthly wage. Results confirm that domestic violence against females and less participation in households’ decision making process decrease females’ accessibility to the Egyptian labor market.Supervised by Dr. Soad Kamel Rizk ; Dr. Jasmin Mahmoud Foua