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Surfacing 3(1) | 2010 1 Gendering Decent Work: Obstacles to Performativity in the Egyptian Work Place by Dahlia Hassanien Over the last two decades, Egyptian women have seen impressive growth in the range and type of opportunities available for accessing the market, with one of the chief advancements being in the area of human capital investments in education for women and girls (Barsoum 2004). Completion rates among Egyptian females today in higher education levels have taken precedence over males (CAPMAS 2008; Barsoum 2004), yet Egypt continues to have one of the lowest female labor participation rates in the world (in Barsoum et al 2009, 3), as only 23.1 percent of Egyptian women are thought to participate in the domestic labor market 1 (ELMPS 1 According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) the market definition of employment includes those who are engaged in economic activity for purposes of market exchange. It further includes those who are currently employed and actively seeking employment.

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Gendering Decent Work: Obstacles to Performativity in the Egyptian Work Place by Dahlia Hassanien Over the last two decades, Egyptian women have seen impressive growth in the range and type of opportunities available for accessing the market, with one of the chief advancements being in the area of human capital investments in education for women and girls (Barsoum 2004). Completion rates among Egyptian females today in higher education levels have taken precedence over males (CAPMAS 2008; Barsoum 2004), yet Egypt continues to have one of the lowest female labor participation rates in the world (in Barsoum et al 2009, 3), as only 23.1 percent of Egyptian women are thought to participate in the domestic labor market1 (ELMPS

1 According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) the market definition of employment includes those who are engaged in economic activity for purposes of market exchange. It further includes those who are currently employed and actively seeking employment.

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2006). Such low levels of recognizable labor participation have caused some analysts to characterize Egypt’s working age women (ages 15-64) as “women at leisure” (Donahoe 1999, 544), conveying an ignorance of the complex interplay between gender and work in Egypt and elsewhere. Underscoring these characterizations are some grim statistics, however, as the World Economic Forum has identified Egypt as one of the worst countries for women in terms of the “gender gaps” in pay and access to economic opportunity (International Trade Union Confederation 2008), ranking it 126th out of 134 countries (Hausman et al 2009).

Institutional quantitative rankings generally fail to reflect some important underlying tensions on two levels. Firstly, gender gaps are approximated at the most macro level by using current rates of visible female labor market participation to derive conclusions about women’s ability to access market opportunities. In other words, the methodology overlooks a host of absolutely critical social expectations and perceptions that influence women’s decision-making with respect to market entry, while also conveying the assumption that all women who can enter the labor market logically will. Such data also fails to draw out useful insights about gender as a social construct which interacts and counteracts with neoliberal conceptualizations of work in the Egyptian setting (Zulfiqar 2010; Beneria 2003; Elyachar 2005; Barsoum et al 2009), a subject to which this essay will return.

As recently as 2009, the International Labour Organization (hereafter ILO) has reasserted itself in an attempt to gender “decent work” as an operational concept, yet in several ways its conceptualization still falls short of acknowledging the role gender plays in contributing to perceptions and expectations of how work should be performed. This essay addresses these methodological gaps by drawing on Judith Butler’s (1988) framework of gender performativity, which she describes as a dynamic, habitual and ritual practice of embodied and performed acts that repeat and reproduce social codes of “sanction and taboo” to perpetuate culture (Butler 1988, 1). Gender performativity enters as a useful construct for achieving the goals of this paper, as it offers a set of tools for calling more acute attention to the reasons why “womanhood” and “work” as competing sets of performative acts tend to compromise rather than support one another in Egypt today.

The obstacles women face in securing quality work in Egypt’s private sector has been widely identified as the primary reason for Egyptian women’s low participation in the labor market (Assaad 1997; Barsoum 2004) and enduring preference for public sector work and its host of gender responsive benefits and securities, including maternity leave, pension and health insurance (Barsoum et al 2009). In responding to cues from NGO research across the global

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South, “decent work”2 continues to be a concept with high purchase in global development praxis and international economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) discourse but has only recently begun to consider the unpaid work performed by women in the domestic sphere. The International Labor Organization (ILO), for example, has started calling attention to the “double burden” women face of paid work in the public sphere and unpaid reproductive labor in the domestic. In a 2009 ILO report, the double burden is described:

Women’s participation in paid labour and access to decent work is particularly affected by the burden of combining reproductive and paid work. This adds stress not accounted for in traditional conceptions of decent work, which focus on paid work and do not examine related changes in reproductive labour (Floro and Meurs 2009, 4).

The double burden paradigm attempts to make space for gender roles by calling attention to women’s roles as mothers, wives and unpaid care laborers inside the home, and ultimately by advocating for structures and regulations in the paid workplace which will allow working women to honor their unpaid domestic commitments—practices like maternity leave, flexible scheduling and health insurance are characteristic of “decent work” approaches. This essay submits that such regulations and workplace practices are not enough to constitute decent work in a gendered sense, as recent NGO research from Cairo suggests that Egyptian women face some important soft obstacles in their performance of gender inside the paid workplace, including sexual harassment, lack of respect and insults to dignity (Barsoum et al 2009). This essay argues that where women’s performance of female gender propriety, including not just the securing of marriage and motherhood but also the preservation of sexual modesty (hay’a), is obstructed by certain treatments and behaviors in the workplace, a set of unique gender pressures arise that are not yet accounted for in traditional conceptions of decent work, which tends to focus on the structural goal of reintegrating family friendly policies as a way to ensure women’s prioritization of domestic responsibilities (Floro and Meurs 2009, 4).

The ILO’s main strategy to gender decent work by reframing it as a double burden between paid private sector and unpaid domestic work does help to draw women’s care economy practices and family friendly policies back into institutional conversations about just livelihoods for women. Yet it stops short of considering women’s need to perform femininity in socially meaningful ways inside the workplace as a way to protect their reputation and cultural 2 “Decent work” and “quality work” are interchangeable concepts generally based on eight standard indicators, including basic personal security, income security, labor market security, employment security, skills reproduction security, job security, work security, voice representation security (Anker et al 2003).

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“honor” more broadly—particularly in country cases like Egypt’s, where codes of female propriety determine other social opportunities for women. By failing to make space for the particular demands and expectations relating to gender performance in the workplace, the double burden paradigm ultimately fails to dislodge women from the patriarchal structures of a neoliberal public sphere dominated by private sector work opportunities (Benerias 2007) and fails to address some critical reasons for why Egyptian women retreat from paid work in large numbers, despite rising levels of education. Moreover, the double burden paradigm runs the risk of reinforcing a binary between paid and unpaid work, either by overstating the value of more and better access to market opportunities or by failing to pick up on important signals in social workplace behavior which make sense only against a backdrop of women’s perceptions of gender performance in the workplace rather than from macro trends “relat[ing to] changes in reproductive labor” (Floro and Meurs 2009, 43).

As the research of Barsoum et al (2009) captures well, the determinants of Egyptian women’s participation in wage work cannot be understood in macroeconomic terms alone, as rising private sector work opportunities and higher levels of educational investment among women have not necessarily translated into higher labor market participation rates, even despite a high demand for work stemming from the current global financial crisis, rising costs and overstretched incomes (Dhillon and Assaad 2008). More nuanced measures for assessing the role “quality” plays in contributing to women’s perceptions of private sector work opportunities are thus urgently needed, as the double burden paradigm tends to compartmentalize notions of quality in the workplace separately from those associated with the domestic sphere, with the former evaluated structurally in the language of policy and neoliberal best practices (Elyachar 2005), and the latter evaluated almost exclusively through the discursive lenses of religion and culture. I suggest here that Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity (1988) provides a useful departure point for exploring the interplay between the spheres of paid work and unpaid domestic work and for making plain women’s need for consistent standards of gender performance as they travel between the two.

Despite a growing interest in the interactions and overlaps between the spheres of paid and domestic work, the academic literature has refrained in large part from drawing causal relationships between them in terms of women’s willingness and ability to perform gender as part of the workplace social setting. The existing researches on decent work and women’s double burden also pay inadequate attention to alternative influences on women’s performance of gender, such as education. This essay hopes to expand current treatments of quality work and women’s double burden to include important shifts in women’s social and behavioral needs, brought on by higher levels of education and a continuing emphasis on traditional performances

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of femininity. Gendering the Double Burden Debates surrounding the compatibility of paid and unpaid work for women have garnered a great deal of attention from researchers and policy makers at the global level in recent years, making the double burden a driving concept in the institutional literature on just livelihoods for women and gender equality more generally. The ILO, for example, tends to advocate for the implementation of “family-friendly” labor policies in the workplace that break down the “artificial separation of work and family” (Floro and Meurs 2010, 13). As recently as March 2010, the ILO posited that while the double burden concept is relevant to both men and women in terms of its implications for household division of labor, a 126 percent growth in women’s participation in wage work worldwide between 1960 and 1997 indicates an urgent need for more refined decent work concepts which can advance a women’s labor agenda, including “work-family initiatives” such as child and elder care, maternity and parental leave, flexible scheduling and leave arrangements, and better home-work and distance-work opportunities (ILO 2000, 115). In drawing out its institutional “gender perspective,” the ILO reminds its audience that, “The rise in labor force participation of women [generally since the 1970s] has induced a change in the roles and expectations of gender, both in the family and in the workplace” (ILO 2000, 116). The Egyptian case contradicts this work in some respects, as Barsoum (2004) and Barsoum et al (2009) suggest that increasing educational attainment rather than increased labor force participation has influenced women’s expectations with respect to mate selection and social standing as a result of class mobility on the one hand, and to specific gender performativity norms in the workplace, such as the ability to observe and uphold hay’a while in the company of male colleagues, on the other.

Research on MENA countries indicates a high premium on family honor, a social construct widely based upon two indicators: women’s adherence to social codes for female propriety as defined by the preservation of sexual modesty or hay’a, and the ability of each family’s men to protect the hay’a of the women in their family (Abu-Zahra 1970, 1080-2). Abu Nasr et al (1985) describes family honor, or sharaf /‘ird, as a primary determinant of women’s low labor participation in the region (1985, 6), arguing that despite the growing visibility of women in paid work positions, social perceptions of sharaf /‘ird continue to shape attitudes about the social and moral value of certain professions as a whole. Mervat Hatem (1988) identifies medicine, teaching and social work as professions that sufficiently conform to social codes for female propriety and hence, as she puts it, coincide with “female temperament” (1988, 419). Some private sector work requires Egyptian women to work long hours in small

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workspaces3 and to commute between work and home (Barsoum et al 2009, 26), requiring women to engage in public space in ways which may compromise both their personal honor and marriageability as individuals, as well as the honor of their families (Abu Nasr et al 1985, 10). Significantly, all of the professions Hatem (1988) considers socially appropriate for women have historically been operated by Egypt’s public sector.

Since the 1950s and 60s, public sector employment in Egypt has been widely perceived as something of a bastion for women’s paid work, particularly in its delivery of gender responsive benefits and securities which enable women to assume their primary cultural function as wives, mothers and symbolic champions of family sharaf /‘ird. According to Shaban, Assaad and Al-Qudsi (1995), the primacy of the public sector in facilitating paid work for women has extended far beyond Egypt and in fact tended to characterize the broader MENA region beginning with the late 1950s (1995, 72), calling back to sharaf /‘ird as a definitive concept driving regional attitudes toward gender propriety and labor market participation. Significant for this analysis is how notions of sharaf /‘ird across the MENA have contributed to distinct perceptions of women’s wage work as a particular nexus of socially sanctioned policies and modes of gender performance.

Public sector work has taken on associations of stature in Egypt since its 1950s prime, as the sector was strategically retooled under President Gamal Abdel Nasser to facilitate the intentional upward mobility of a broadly strewn, modernist and socialist leaning Egyptian middle class. Within Nasser’s vision, free and universal education became an essential sphere through which the nation’s new values and ideologies could take root and become productive. Nasser’s vision for Egypt grew in the spirit of the 1952 coup d’état, led by a group of military strongmen known as the Free Officers, and has been widely recognized as an agenda which, among other contributions, advanced Egyptian women’s place in the labor market. Nasser’s centralization of state functions into an expansive bureaucratic network increased women’s visibility in paid work through a spectrum of flexible government jobs offering secure employment and regulated benefits for women’s gender specific needs. Nasser’s codification of such values in Egypt’s civil code also helped to secure those newfound opportunities, as labor Law 91 of 1954 guaranteed for the first time equal rights and equal wage for women (Moghadam 2003, 57). In its amended form, Law 91 of 1959 guaranteed women workers 50 days maternity leave at a pay rate of 75 percent of their wage, protection from dismissal during leave and childcare facilities for establishments comprised of 100 female workers or more (Zuhur 1992, 51). Nasser declared it a “duty for women to participate in building the national economy” (in Hoodfar 1997, 105) and 3 Small-sized workplaces have been found to increase the probability of sexual harassment, particularly if a woman is the only female in that workplace (Barsoum 2004). This problem is mostly experienced in the private sector where 90 percent of non-agricultural enterprises are comprised of ten workers or less (in Barsoum et al 2009, 13).

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coupled the state’s policy efforts with some practical strategies to bring women more prominently into the labor force, including the graduate guarantee initiative of 1962, which assured government jobs to all university and vocational secondary school graduates and sent women’s achievements in education and paid work toward a steady incline.

Women’s Entry into Paid Work in Egypt Fluctuations in female labor market participation in Egypt are often interpreted in the institutional literature as indicators of women’s trading off between work in the public and private spheres—again, the double burden—and tends to focus on workplace policies in rather essentialist cultural and religious terms, even among Arab scholars. In Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism (1992), Mervat Hatem characterizes a popular argument which maintains that, despite the legal and regulatory advancements women gained as a result of Nasser’s public sector infrastructure and modern socialist ideology, perceptions of gender propriety and divisions of labor in the domestic sphere continued to be mediated through the languages of culture and religion in Egypt, while women remained positioned, first and foremost, as reproducers of the modern Egyptian nation. Hatem argues that despite significant female gains in education and employment between 1960 and 1976, when Nasser’s “state feminism” enabled tripling women’s enrollment in primary and secondary education and six-fold growth in the number of women university graduates (1982, 240), Egyptian women held fast to traditional norms relating to female propriety and the division of sexual labor, in part because this more traditional role was also safeguarded by the state. Hatem sees Egyptian women’s mass influx into education and paid work following the 1962 graduate guarantee as having occurred without interruption in women’s performance of unpaid domestic commitments (1992, 242). Thus Hatem concludes that no significant shifts took place in terms of what women expected, valued and prioritized with regard to the tradeoff between paid and domestic work during Nasser’s presidency.

As the legal and regulatory advances of Nasser’s “state feminism” in the social sphere came up against the country’s turn toward open market policies and neoliberal reforms under Sadat’s program of Infitah4 in the mid 70s, and then Mubarak’s economic reform and structural adjustment policies (ERSAP)5 in the early 90s, Hatem argues that Egyptian women retreated en masse to the domestic sphere as the social opportunity costs of paid employment grew

4 Infitah, or “opening of the door” is the term used to characterize Egypt’s initial phase of economic liberalization policies, which was ushered in by President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s. 5 ERSAP refers to the era of Egypt’s full commitment to economic liberalization with a series of structural reforms in 1991 under President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s current economy is every bit a reflection of Mubarak’s ERSAP commitments.

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prohibitively high, particularly inasmuch as employment lags for men6 produced changes in women’s marriageability prospects (1992, 237). Nasser’s “state feminism,” Hatem (1992) argues, created a kind of institutional equilibrium between promoting women’s visible and equitable participation in wage work with strategies to ensure the economic sustainability of the Egyptian household and, by extension, the Egyptian state. In this way, women’s unpaid work in the domestic sphere gained an unprecedented level of visibility in Egyptian society, through which women’s familial role took on new social and cultural value that the state and society were eager to protect.

While Hatem (1992) does not read this new visibility as indicative of shifts in how Egyptian women performed femininity, she does read this moment in Egyptian sociopolitical history as having had the potential to shift attitudes toward women’s paid and unpaid work until it succumbed to an era of neoliberal reforms and its emphasis on gender-blind productivity (1992, 235). Homa Hoodfar (1997) argues somewhat similarly to Hatem (1992) that changes in Egypt’s state policies toward women, work and education under Nasser and its subsequent administrations did not offer gender responsive employment opportunities with the aim of challenging gender practices and values, but rather to achieve the overall goal of fostering a productive and modern Egyptian nation. As Hoodfar notes, “neither the [public sector work] facilities nor the new educational system [under Nasser] was designed to influence the prevailing domestic sexual division of labor” (1997, 107).

Valentine Moghadam (2003) applies a more regional logic to Egyptian women’s collective retreat from paid work in the 1970s and 80s. Departing from the 70s oil boom, its wide-scale migration of male Arab nationals to the Arabian Gulf for work and impressive remittance inflows for wives and families still living in Egypt, Moghadam argues that Egyptian women saw less utility in wage work outside the home when male wages were high (2003, 58-79). As women saw less value in paid work, a supply-side shrinkage of women laborers took shape as women returned to the domestic sphere exclusively as wives and mothers. In this environment, Moghadam argues that Egyptian women began reidentifying with more traditional gender norms and Islamic readings of family obligation and gender propriety, which in turn increased the collective influence and proliferation of such norms.

Some important interplay can be found between Hatem (and Hoodfar) and Moghadam, as each author draws attention to important disconnects between a rising need for women’s paid and unpaid work as household incomes in Egypt deflate, and Egyptian women’s socially-construed perceptions of the value of paid work. For Hatem and Moghadam both, the primary function of Egyptian women’s engagement with paid work has been to ensure the economic sustainability of the household unit rather than to reorder norms of gender construction and performance. While Hatem (1992) sees potential for a reevaluation of gender norms within the

6 While the intersections between women’s rising education levels, labor market stagnation and obstacles to gender performativity on the one hand and men’s performance of masculinity on the other is far beyond the scope of this essay, the work identifies an urgent need for greater understanding of how labor market trends, particularly high unemployment, affect men’s performance of gender and whether trends like sexual harassment may be evidence of men’s attempt to reclaim the workplace as a space of masculinity in the face of women’s rising education and market entry.

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historical moment of her analysis, Moghadam (2003) draws out the exclusively need-based relationship Egyptian women held to paid work in the late 1970s and 80s. Both agree that Egyptian women’s commitment to the performance of unpaid work in the domestic sphere as mothers and wives went uninterrupted even as Egyptian women became more visible in paid work positions and national labor policies. Yet questions remain as to why Egyptian women today, even despite higher levels of education, steadily available paid work opportunities and great economic need resulting from the ongoing global financial crisis, refrain from consistent private sector employment in high numbers. In addressing this question, this essay examines women’s sexual modesty or hay’a as a set of gender performance norms intended to secure marriage, motherhood and family honor as cultural values as a possible indicator for understanding Egyptian women’s low market entry.

Sitt a l -bayt , Hay’a and Workplace Obstacles Changes in the structure of Egypt’s economy and its advancements toward an export oriented character have caused many women to seek out temporary formal and informal paid work opportunities in the private sector to remediate the growing economic need that now characterizes most Egyptian households (Radwan 2009). Yet temporary and sporadic paid work positions rather than career trajectories still tend to be the norm, as women continue to find paid work in the private sector costly in terms of the social injuries they are forced to endure from male supervisors and colleagues. As the research of Barsoum et al (2009) points out, working women referred to a lack of “respect,” “dignity” and “trust” from male colleagues in the workplace, and frustration with sexual harassment, long hours worked and unequal, inequitable wages paid (2009, 10-17). These experiences leave working women feeling that they have been sexually and socially degraded by having their personal honor compromised and, in turn, are understood to have the potential to affect working women’s marriageability, particularly women from low and middle class family backgrounds, by making them vulnerable to rumor and loss of sexual innocence and ultimately preventing them from achieving sitt al-bayt status.

Sitt al-bayt, meaning literally “lady of the home” or “homemaker,” is a social title taken on by women after marriage, which carries deep social and cultural significance and invites a standard set of shared beliefs and values about a woman’s social, cultural and spiritual role in society. Sitt al-bayt as a female archetype has long denoted prestige and class association in Egypt, as it has traditionally been women with more highly educated husbands and higher socioeconomic standing who refrain from work outside the home (Rugh 1985; Donahoe 1999), while women with lower-earning husbands are considered more likely to work for pay (Donahoe 1999). Sitt al-bayt as a model for female propriety guides women’s performance of gender toward the goals of marriage and motherhood, and its fulfillment rests upon the protection of female sexual modesty, or hay’a (Abu Zahra 1970). Narrative evidence gathered by Barsoum et al (2009) indicates that Egyptian women perceive private sector work as interfering with their ability to perform femininity in a way that preserves both sexual modesty and social class as determined by her level of education, particularly the lack of “decent treatment” by male employers and colleagues in the workplace in the form of harsh scolding and reprimands for minor mistakes, assignment of menial and inferior tasks for the woman’s level of skill and

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position, sexually suggestive or explicit comments, gestures or touching, and insufficient pay (2009, 11-15). These experiences challenge women’s ability to perform female gender in socially condoned ways not simply by presenting a threat to their sexual innocence, but also by presenting them with scenarios in which they must either directly and openly challenge men’s power—which consequently makes them appear un-feminine in cultural terms—or suffer in silence, as few private sector workplaces offer recourse mechanisms to women employees.

A number of authors have suggested that as Egyptian women’s educational levels rise and economic need increases across the class spectrum, greater emphasis is placed on seeking out educated and financially secure mates (Elbadawy 2010; Hoodfar 1997; Singerman 1995; Rugh 1985).7 In research conducted over 2008, Barsoum et al (2009) determined that Egyptian women’s perceptions of paid work in the private sector had deteriorated even beyond their already low levels in 2004, when Barsoum discovered the common perception that “self respecting women stay home” (Barsoum 2004, 13). Andrea Rugh (1985) pointed out more than twenty years ago that strategic mate selection has conventionally been of great significance to women with minimal education and poor job prospects in Egypt (1985, 58). Elbadawy (2010) has also illustrated how Egyptian women’s chances of attracting a desirable mate can be facilitated by investments in her education, which would in turn elevate her status.8 Interestingly for this work, the narratives of working women offered in Barsoum et al (2009) also draw out even more subtle obstacles to gender performance for Egyptian women, many of which are unique to the differences in level of education between male and female colleagues and the expectations of treatment which women derive from their level of education and class association.

Women’s Retreat from Paid Work in Egypt As the following table from the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (2006) illustrates, public sector employment for Egyptian women has been on a steady decline since 1998, while the number of “ever married” and unmarried women seeking paid work in the private sector showed strong growth through 2006.9

7 While this may suggest that Egyptian women’s higher education levels better position them to prosper in the workplace, a continued adherence to sitt al-bayt gender performance puts the bulk of the burden to secure household income traditionally on the male partner. 8 Although this strategy is “automatic” for middle and high income families, it is still regarded as a large sacrifice for poor income families who could have benefited from the daughter’s engagement in labor from a young age. Although education in Egypt is free, its quality is often poor, requiring expensive supplementary private tutoring in many cases. 9 Data is yet unavailable for these variables in the years following the global financial crisis of 2008. Since the crisis more women have been forced, however reluctantly, to seek out paid formal and informal work opportunities in the private sector.

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1998 2006

Public wage

Private formal

Private informal

Public wage

Private formal

Private informal

Ever Married 88.3% 4.1% 7.6% 83.2% 6.3% 10.5%

Never Married

50.4% 12.7% 37% 34.14% 20.5% 45.4%

Total 77.4% 6.6% 16% 69.9% 10.2% 20%

Source: Assaad and El Hamidi (2009) and ELMPS 2006 survey data (ages 15-64). Growth in “never married” women’s employment may not indicate stable growth in long term employment, but rather higher numbers of short term positions, as marriage remains a high priority for this cohort. One key barrier to career track female employment in Egypt’s private sector is an unfriendly regulatory environment, despite a number of legal guarantees that aim to assist women in balancing the double burden of paid and unpaid work. Al-Bassusi and El-Kogali (2001) investigate young Egyptian women’s motives for entering the labor market, finding that costs associated with the household and preparation for marriage were common reasons for seeking private sector employment. Other authors similarly identify rising marriage costs as a driving cause for young women to seek employment before marriage (Singerman and Ibrahim 2001; Amin and Al-Bassusi 2001), and argue that private sector employers in Egypt are using such social trends among “never married” women and a lack of labor law enforcement by the state to their advantage (Al Bassusi and El Kogali 2001; Assaad and El Hamidi 2009).

Al-Bassussi and El-Kogali assert that Egypt’s shift from the public sector to the private, and from the production of non-tradables such as services10 to tradables, has caused many women to lose their source of livelihood (Al-Bassussi and El-Kogali 2001, 28). Due to limited employment opportunities for decent and flexible work for women outside of the public sector in recent years, educated women are seemly electing not to join the labor force (Barsoum et al 2009). A number of authors have argued that women’s reservation wages11 have evidently increased with the shrinking of public sector employment opportunities (Assaad 2003; Barsoum et al 2009). The reservation wage is thus presumed to be below that of the public-sector wage, but above private-sector wages (Assaad 2003, 130). As a result, Barsoum et al (2009) assert that

10 A sector once largely composed of women workers. 11 The reservation wage is the cut-off point at which individuals decide that work is preferable than other ways to use their time (World Bank 2004, 101). For example, women with family duties may have a high reservation wage that would be sufficient for paying for childcare, or a maid, or for purchasing products on the market rather than making it at home.

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a large proportion of Egyptian women will not consider private sector employment due to the evident barriers discussed in this paper, and instead prefer to queue for public-sector jobs or to remain out of the labor force altogether.

Conclusion This paper reviews Egyptian women’s employment rates through the cultural perspectives of gender performativity, female propriety, and education. Complex interplays between these factors have made a significant impact on Egyptian women’s choices regarding labor force participation, particularly in the private sector. By drawing on Judith Butler’s framework of gender performativity (1988), it has been argued that Egyptian women refrain from participation in the labor market, in part, because of a lack of decent treatment from male colleagues and supervisors, which interferes with working women’s ability to perform gender in ways that will ensure their marriageability and social mobility. Much of the literature analyzing working conditions for women in Egypt’s private sector have highlighted the obstacles women face in performing gender, particularly for those with considerable education, including inflexible policies making the work / family balance unmanageable, poor job security, exposure to sexual harassment and unjust treatment, and unequal wages to male colleagues. Hence, the majority of women employed in the private sector are recognized as never-married women who are temporarily working as a strategy for accumulating marriage costs or while queuing for a public sector job (Al-Bassussi and El-Kogali 2001; Wahba 2009). Although Egypt has reformed its labor laws to support women workers, a lack of enforcement of these laws often works against women who are employed in the private sector. Hence it is vital that the state begin providing incentives to private sector employers to encourage them to promote gender equitable practices in the workplace, particularly that which affects women’s marriageability and desired performance of gender.

References

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