Local Industrial Structure and Female Participation in Paid Work :

The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of local industrial structure on female participation in paid work. Specifically, the research aims at investigating the extent to which limits on women’s ability to commute restricts their ability to take paid jobs outside the government. As Egypt’s economy moves away from a state-led model to a greater market orientation, the position of women in the labor market is crucially dependent on their ability to access private sector jobs. The record in that respect in the 1990s is not encouraging. Moreover, working women are much likely to commute to work than men, with both men and women in private employment having to commute across agglomeration boundaries significantly more than their counterparts in public employment. Coupled with the well-established pattern that women’s paid employment tends to be concentrated in a limited number of industries, these commuting patterns motivate the main hypothesis of this paper, namely that the local availability of genderappropriate jobs is an important determinant of whether a woman participates in paid employment outside the government. The empirical analysis confirms such a hypothesis. These results have important policy implications. The first implication is that for the benefits of employment to be equitably distributed, current practices as to the location of economic activity must be altered. The current practice in Egypt is to provide tax breaks and other infrastructure subsidies for private firms to locate in new industrial cities, located at some distance from existing population centers. Other policies explicitly discourage industrial location in populated centers. These towns have for the most part failed as residential settlements, with the vast majority of their workers commuting considerable distances to get to them. One of the immediate consequences of such a policy is to make private sector employment inaccessible to most women. At a broader level, the findings of this research suggest that a distribution of economic activity, so as to achieve a better match between residential and work locations, should be an important policy goal if women are to be protected from the adverse consequences of economic liberalization and the down-sizing of public sector employment.