Abstract
BackgroundWomen’s empowerment is often used to explain changes in reproductive behavior, but no consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape women’s empowerment over time. Fertility may cause changes in women’s empowerment, or they may be mutually influencing. Research on women’s empowerment and fertility relies on cross-sectional data from South Asia, which limits the understanding of the direction of association between women’s empowerment and fertility in other global contexts. This study uses two waves of a panel survey from a prominent Middle Eastern country, Egypt, to examine the trajectory of women’s empowerment and the relationship between first and subsequent births and empowerment over time.MethodsUsing longitudinal data from the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey, a nationally representative sample of households in Egypt, for 4660 married women 15 to 49 years old, multilevel negative binomial, ordinary least squares, and logistic regression models estimate women’s empowerment and consider whether a first and subsequent births are associated with empowerment later in life. Women’s empowerment is operationalized through four measures of agency: individual household decision-making, joint household decision-making, mobility, and financial autonomy.ResultsA first birth and subsequent births are significantly positively associated with all measures of empowerment except financial autonomy in 2012. Women who have not had a birth make 30% fewer individual household decisions and 14% fewer joint household decisions in 2012 compared to women with a first birth. There is also a positive relationship with mobility, as women with a first birth have more freedom of movement compared to women with no births. Earlier empowerment is also an important predictor of empowerment later in life.ConclusionsIncorporating the influence of life events like first and subsequent births helps account for the possibility that empowerment is dynamic and that life course experiences shape women’s empowerment. This and the notion that empowerment builds over time helps portray women’s lives more completely, demonstrates the importance of empowerment early in the life course, and addresses issues of temporality in empowerment fertility research.
Highlights
Women’s empowerment is often used to explain changes in reproductive behavior, but no consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape women’s empowerment over time
The majority of the studies of empowerment and fertility are cross sectional, which limits understanding of the temporality of the relationship, and no studies consider the relationship between fertility and empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa [11]. This study addresses these gaps and takes a longitudinal approach by using two waves of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS), 2006 and 2012, to examine how women’s empowerment changes over a 6-year period and, how women’s fertility affects empowerment over time in Egypt
Under various economic conditions, having children, sons in particular, is associated with more bargaining power for married women [17, 28, 29]. This implies that the relationship between fertility and empowerment would likely remain the same in periods of economic expansion, but future research is needed to confirm the association under other economic conditions. These findings suggest that fertility is important for women’s position within the family and community in Egypt, and fertility should be included in the study of empowerment over time
Summary
Women’s empowerment is often used to explain changes in reproductive behavior, but no consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape women’s empowerment over time. This study uses two waves of a panel survey from a prominent Middle Eastern country, Egypt, to examine the trajectory of women’s empowerment and the relationship between first and subsequent births and empowerment over time. Promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment are strategies used to lower fertility [4, 5]. Little consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape empowerment over time. A recent review of empowerment and fertility found that empowerment is associated with lower fertility [6], greater birth spacing [7], greater contraceptive use [8], lower ideal family size and fertility preferences [9], and increased access to maternal health care [10, 11]. Fertility changes household dynamics and women’s lives, which may
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