Program > Papers by author > Sadania Clémentine

This paper provides a better understanding of the determinants of a woman's participation in the household

decision-making process, by focusing on the role of women's economic participation. If women's employment

is considered as a major source of empowerment, existing evidence suffers from several limitations, which I

attempt to address. First, I develop an instrumental variable strategy to take into account the endogeneity of

the decision to work. Second, because the Egyptian female labor market is highly segmented, I allow for a

heteregenous impact of work by distinguishing between the public sector, outside work in the private sector

and home-based work. Third, I measure women's empowerment as the probability to have the final say in a

household decision in two ways. Using the 2006 and 2012 rounds Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey, I

run both probit and recursive bivariate probit regressions of the impact of different types of work on women's

involvement in decision-making. I find that working outside home enhances a woman's autonomy in personal

decisions, and joint decision-making over major economic and children-related decisions. Interestingly, home-

based work positively affects joint decision-making. My results suggest that, beyond remuneration, women's

work acts as a signal on women's abilities in non-domestic spheres of competence.