Do Female Gender Role Attitudes Affect Labour Market Participation in Egypt?

We analyse the inter-generational relationship of attitudes towards gender roles and their impact on individuals’ labour market participations in Egypt. We find a strong correlation between mothers’ and daughters’ perceptions of gender roles. Unlike the existing literature, perceptions are not associated with the labour market status even if we control for endogeneity issues using an instrumental variable regression. Furthermore, higher-educated females are more likely to be unemployed in Egypt. These results imply that perceptions among females are not translated into their labour market behaviour and the supply-side policies alone may not be sufficient for improving young women’s employment opportunities.