Two myths about contextual effects on Middle Eastern women’s employment: a multilevel analysis of trends in Egypt and Jordan

In studies on the influence of contextual factors on women’s employment in the Middle East, two myths figure regularly, which both seems to be related to the disentanglement of micro and macro levels. By applying a more comprehensive view and using multilevel models, we provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between the contextual and individual level regarding women’s non-agricultural employment in Egypt and Jordan. First, we show that large uniform contextual processes such as globalization and modernization are not satisfying in explaining women’s employment. The processes are more complex. Egypt and Jordan seem to modernize rather linearly, but if we look more closely at the processes and also take individual-level data in to account, women’s employment does not show the same pattern. Globalization and modernization are no panacea to gender equality. Second, we focus on the myth of ‘micro-level stability’ and have shown that the effect of individual and household factors has changed over time. The influence of education, the most important explanatory factor of women’s nonagricultural employment, has a declining effect. Furthermore, having (young) children seems to become a less restricting influence on women’s employment. Draft versions of this paper are presented at the 7th Middle East Economics Association, 29th-31st May 2008, Famagusta, North Cyprus and the Arab Thought Forum/Centre for International Business and Innovation conference on Globalization in the Arab World, 3rd-4th February 2008, Amman, Jordan. We thank the participations of these conferences for the useful comments. We are grateful to Ellen Webbink and Janine Huisman (Dep. of Economics, Radboud University Nijmegen) for their part in building the database used.