Investigating Female Labor Force Participation

This Discussion Paper has been presented as a part of the workshop called The Social-Economic Situation of Middle East Youth on the Eve of the Arab Spring, hosted on December 8 - 9th, 2012 at the American University in Beirut. Using data from both the Egyptian and the Jordanian Labor Market Panel Surveys, the present research aims at investigating females’ labor force participation and, to analyze the effect of marital and parental status on employment choices over time. The later are public employees, private employees, employers, self-employed, unpaid family workers and, inactive and others. Very different results are expected for each of these states as the family-friendly policies are not equally applied in all sectors. Marital and parental statuses are expected to affect differently female participation in the labor force. A multinomial logit model is estimated to assess the effect of the different factors on females’ employment choices. The results of this study are expected to be of great importance to show which policies should be made available to improve women’s economic conditions in the labor market and to make sure that the private sector can be as attractive for female workers as the public sector.