IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v28y2022i2p247-279.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Impact of Marriage on Women's Employment in the Middle East and North Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Ragui Assaad
  • Caroline Krafft
  • Irene Selwaness

Abstract

Marriage is a central stage in the transition to adulthood in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This article investigates the effect of marriage on women's employment in MENA, examining how different types of work are affected by relatively early marriage, defined as marriage by the median age of marriage. An important contribution of this study is to examine the two main mechanisms by which marriage can affect work: (1) its effect on ever entering work and (2) its effect on exiting work. This study endogenizes the marriage decision using an instrumental variables approach. It finds that marriage by the median age reduces women's probability of market work by 47 percent in Jordan, 30 percent in Tunisia, and 16 percent in Egypt. Much of the effect is due to a reduction in the probability of private wage work, which women tend to leave at marriage.HIGHLIGHTS Women in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia often leave employment at marriage.Marrying by the median age has varying effects on different types of employment.Women are particularly likely to leave private sector wage work at marriage.Changes are needed to reconcile private wage employment with women's domestic roles.

Suggested Citation

  • Ragui Assaad & Caroline Krafft & Irene Selwaness, 2022. "The Impact of Marriage on Women's Employment in the Middle East and North Africa," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(2), pages 247-279, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:28:y:2022:i:2:p:247-279
    DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2021.2007415
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2021.2007415
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13545701.2021.2007415?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dang, Hai-Anh H. & Salehi-Isfahani, Djavad & Do, Minh N. N., 2024. "The impacts of COVID-19 on female labor force participation in Iran," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1440, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    2. Krafft Caroline & Assaad Ragui, 2021. "Introducing the Jordan Labor Market Panel Survey 2016," IZA Journal of Development and Migration, Sciendo & Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 12(1), pages 1-42, January.
    3. Tzannatos, Zafiris & Saif, Ibrahim, 2023. "Assessing the Sustainability of Jordan’s Public Debt," FDL Policy Notes 2308, CEPREMAP.
    4. Irene Selwaness & Caroline Krafft, 2021. "The Dynamics of Family Formation and Women’s Work: What Facilitates and Hinders Female Employment in the Middle East and North Africa?," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 40(3), pages 533-587, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:28:y:2022:i:2:p:247-279. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.