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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the gender differences in time poverty in two Middle East North African (MENA) countries, particularly Egypt and Tunisia, as well as examining its determinants across gender.

To this end, the authors make use of data provided by the Labor Market Panel Survey (LMPS) in Egypt (2012) and in Tunisia (2014) to estimate probit regressions to identify various determinants that explain time poverty.

The empirical findings show that the probability of time poverty, in both countries, is lower for women compared to men. In addition, the determinants of time poverty (individual, household and community variables) and their marginal effects differ across gender.

Research on the gender inequalities in time poverty and its determinants has been very limited. Additionally, the relationships between individuals’ time use and the conditions under which this might represent time poverty have not been fully studied in the literature. Moreover, most of the available studies have focused on developed countries; while studies tackling this issue in developing countries are very few. For the MENA region, in particular, this topic is totally missing in the available literature.

This paper aims to tackle an important question related to women’s economic empowerment in highly patriarchal societies like Egypt. The paper discusses individual, household, wealth and location factors determining women empowerment, as measured by two dimensions: decision-making power and mobility.

Using the “Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey” (ELMPS) 2012, a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model was estimated to study the main economic resources and social constraints that determine women empowerment as measured by the power of women over household decisions and her freedom of movement in Egypt.

Three key messages could be delivered. First, women’s own economic resources as captured by her employment status are an important source of her empowerment. Second, contrary to theoretical prediction education is not playing its expected role in developing awareness and transforming ideas concerning gender roles in Egypt. Third, the importance of social local context is fundamental for Egyptian women empowerment.

This study is an attempt to address some of the gaps in the literature for the Egyptian case, where there is a lack in rigorous studies measuring women empowerment and examining its determinates. This is done by first, tackling multiple dimension of women’s empowerment, decision-making inside households and freedom of mobility. Second, using MIMIC model, which is a modeling approach that allows for studying the relations between several causes of a given latent variable, such as “Empowerment” in our case, and a number of its possible indicators, without a directly observable measure of the latent variable. Third, using the most recent set of data; the ELMPS 2012 which has a special focus on women’s resources and agency that permits greater content validity of the multidimensional setup. Forth, the macro level differences in women’s status are tackled through using location dummy variables. Finally, given the important correlation between wealth level and women empowerment, the paper is considered a first attempt to analyze such impact by including a variable that captures the wealth level of the woman’s household as one determinant of empowerment.

This paper aims to analyze the determinants on job satisfaction in the Egyptian labor market, using Egypt’s Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS), the wave of 2012.

Several determinants are analyzed including the wage level, the paid and sick leaves, the medical and social insurance, job stability among other individual and job characteristics. To this end, an ordered logit model is estimated to assess the significance of these different variables as determinants for job satisfaction.

The empirical findings indicate that wages and stability are major determinants for job satisfaction for the sample of wage workers. However, the results change according to gender; the hourly wage level affects men’s level of job satisfaction, while it does not affect that of females. Furthermore, the job satisfaction of women is determined more by the job characteristics rather than the monetary compensation.

The empirical findings shed light on the importance of formalizing jobs, as it has an effect on the level of job satisfaction of both women and men.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the determinants of job satisfaction for wage workers in Egypt using the ELMPS data.