In Egypt I was fairly consistently surprised by the high percentage of men in fields that are balanced or dominated by women in the States. Service industry jobs like clerks, maids, wait staff, and the like were disproportionately likely to be male. I think this can be fairly directly traced to low rates of labor participation by females and the high unemployment rate for men. The chart below is from the Population Council and while the labor participation rate increases for men as they age it stays low for women. I found the study via the viable opposition blog, it has a lot of other good demographic information.
The trip’s tour company, does charitable work in Egypt through the Grand Circle foundation and took us to see a seamstress shop that they’d provided with some start up capital and sewing machines. The hire widows, unmarried women, and other females who have insufficient other means of support. The west bank of Luxor is some mix of Rural and Urban Upper Egypt and as the chart above shows, women generally don’t find a lot of opportunities to work.
The woman in charge described how they try to reinforce the economic opportunities with education. The workers are told of the benefits of birth control, delaying one’s first child, and of spacing out children. The workers then tell their families and friends in an attempt to leverage the work in the larger community. They claim fairly dramatic success which would suggest that the high rural birth rate is driven in good part by ignorance of family planning methods rather than directly by cultural or religious pressures. This seems consistent with a Rand study by Mona Khalifa, Julie DaVanzo, and David M. Adamson. In the chart space refers to time between pregnancy and limit refers to restricting overall family size. I’d expect the west bank near Luxor to be one of the more prosperous parts of rural upper Egypt, but even so the need for family planning services is striking.
We picked up a few items in the shop and didn’t get a great deal on them, but I’ll skip the bargaining practicum as this is the sort of thing I’m willing to pay a premium to support.
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