Micro and macro-level determinants of women’s employment in six MENA countries

Determinants of women’s employment are studied using data for 65,000 women living in 103 districts of six Arab countries. At the household level, socio-economic factors, care duties, and values are most important, and at the district-level economic development and gender equality. Women’s education clearly takes in a key position. Interaction analysis shows the effect of education to be stronger for women with less care duties and women married to higher educated partners. This last finding suggests a ceiling effect of husband’s socio-economic status on wives’ achievements. Returns to education are also higher in more traditional districts. Our results stress the importance of education as a major road towards women’s empowerment in these countries. Draft versions of this paper are presented at the 6th Middle East Economics Association, 14th-16th March 2007, Dubai, United Arab Emirates and the IZA-World Bank conference on Employment and Development, 8th-9th July 2007, Bonn, Germany. 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.