ICT and Women’s Empowerment in Egypt: An Empirical Study

Studying the Digital Gender Divide in African countries, including Egypt, is considered vital for social and economic development. It is an established fact that one of the UN Millennium Development Goals is gender equality and the empowerment of women. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be the vehicle to achieve this goal. This study applies econometric techniques to shed some light on the impact of ICT ownership on the gender divide, and how ICT can play an effective role in empowering women in Egypt. Furthermore, the effect of ICT on women’s lives in relation to other relevant factors such as education, income and geographic location is also investigated. Finally, recommendations are provided to the policy maker to enhance gender equality in Egypt through increasing the role of ICT in empowering women. The contribution of this paper is the introduction of an ICT ownership index from the sample data ELMPS06, as well as the introduction of a women’s empowerment index. Results reveal that the ICT ownership index is largely influenced by education and gender, while the ICT ownership index has a significant impact on women’s empowerment in Egypt. However in the obtained results, controlling for other individual characteristics like women’s occupation and economic activity, the ICT ownership index becomes statistically insignificant.