Women's political participation and intrahousehold empowerment: Evidence from the Egyptian Arab Spring

Abstract

Egyptian women have played an unprecedented role in the Arab Spring democratic movement, possibly changing women's perception about their own rights and role. We question whether these events have translated into better outcomes within Egyptian households. We conjecture that potential changes must have been heterogeneous and depended on the local intensity of protests and women's participation over 2011-13. We exploit the geographical heterogeneity along these two margins to conduct a double difference analysis using data surrounding the period. We find a significant improvement in women's final say regarding decisions on health, socialization and household expenditure, as well as a decline in the acceptation of domestic violence and girls' circumcision, in the regions most affected by the protests. This effect is not due to particular regional patterns or preexisting trends in empowerment. It is also robust to alternative treatment definitions and confirmed by triple difference estimations. We confront our main interpretation to alternative mechanisms that could have explained this effect.

The Arab Spring, A Setback for Gender Equality? Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

“…Our FLFP results are in opposition to the two studies on the Egyptian Arab Spring which find improvement in women's status indicated by improvements in relative FLFP (El-Mallakh et al, 2018) and women's intrahousehold decision-making power (Bargain et al, 2019).…”

“…Our findings contradict those from EI-Mallakh (2018) and Bargain et al (2019) on the influences of Arab Spring protests on gender equality, suggesting that their findings from Egypt cannot be generalized to other MENA countries. On the other hand, our findings are consistent with those in Fox et al (2016), which shows that the support for "secular feminism" has declined across Arab Spring countries.…”

“…Coefficient estimates suggest that a one-standard-deviation increase in protests is associated with a reduction in the support for the three women's rights statements by 3.4, 4.2 and 6.0 percentage points, respectively. (Bargain et al, 2019).…”

“…Only few studies have investigated the effects of the Arab Spring protests on gender views and outcomes. EI-Mallakh (2018) and Bargain et al (2019) both use two waves of data surrounding the 2011 protests in Egypt and employ a difference-in-difference approach to investigate the change in women's empowerment caused by the protests.…”

The Silenced Women: Can Public Activism Stimulate Reporting of Violence against Women?

“…I compare this conceptualization of shock-exposure to measures of treatment intensity used in past studies. The growing body of work that examines the effect of the Arab Spring protests uses different measures of protest intensity such as number of protesters (Acemoglu et al, 2018), number of martyrs (El-Mallakh et al, 2018) and number of fatalities, injuries and arrests (Bargain et al, 2019). I do not use such measures in this study for three key reasons.…”