Women’s Agency and Fertility: Recent Evidence from Egypt

Goleen Samari ()
Additional contact information
Goleen Samari: University of Texas at Austin

Population Research and Policy Review, 2017, vol. 36, issue 4, No 4, 582 pages

Abstract: Abstract Fertility reached a two decade high of 3.5 births per woman in Egypt in 2014. Lower status of women is associated with higher fertility. Majority of the studies on women’s agency and fertility rely on individual-level cross-sectional data from South Asia, which limits the understanding of variation among communities and the direction of the relationship between women’s agency and fertility in other global contexts. This study examines the relationship between women’s agency and fertility longitudinally and among communities in the most populous country in the Middle East-Egypt. For 3795 ever married women 15–49 years old in the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey, multilevel models are estimated for having given birth and number of births between 2006 and 2012. Contrary to expectation, women with more agency with greater participation in household decision-making and mobility are, in fact, more likely to have had a birth and have a greater total number of births. Only women with more egalitarian attitudes are associated with fewer births. Community membership explains 5% of the variation in fertility. Since social norms in Egypt favor a higher number of births and labor market participation among women is low, women with agency could be fulfilling social expectations of having children and choosing to have more children.

Keywords: Women’s Agency; Fertility; Empowerment; Women’s health; Egypt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11113-017-9427-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:poprpr:v:36:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s11113-017-9427-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/11113/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11113-017-9427-3

Access Statistics for this article

Population Research and Policy Review is currently edited by D.A. Swanson

More articles in Population Research and Policy Review from Springer, Southern Demographic Association (SDA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().