The Impact of COVID-19 on Women’s Economic Empowerment

The foreseen impact of the COVID-19 health crisis on careers, and career aspirations is unprecedented. The COVID-19 crisis has already shown worldwide, and particularly in the MENA region, preliminary signs of the challenges faced by individuals (i) to remain attached to their jobs, (ii) to maintain the same working terms and conditions they had before the pandemic, and (iii) the new increased hurdles to find jobs in the case of the unemployed. Moreover, the COVID-19 related restrictions and measures such as social distancing, quarantine measures, closures of schools and daycares, work from home…etc., and have all led people to value a job differently. The desirability of non-monetary job attributes has been substantially impacted. This clearly impacts labor supply, particularly women’s, in all countries. Low and middle-income countries, such as the MENA region, are even more prone to a more amplified impact. In these economies, women are still considered to be the main responsible of most, if not all, household-related activities, even though men are stepping in more than earlier times in history. In MENA, the biased division of labor in care and household chores clearly results in stagnant low female labor force participation rates, even though gender educational gaps have continued to close over the past two decades. The above mentioned negative effects are even prone to be further amplified within the MENA region given its institutional setting. The presence of an over-sized public employer, a substantial share of informal wage employment and stagnant low female participation rates are common characteristics of a prototypical MENA labor market. The COVID-19 shock within such a context, is nothing but expected to lead to a substantially worsened situation and the adjustment to the shock is hence forecasted to be slow and challenging, if not handled appropriately. A prompt policy response is therefore necessary to alleviate between the different employment sectors, the individuals’ –especially women’s- change in preferences and aspirations, and the newly developed economic constraints.

To be able to provide the necessary policy responses and to avoid the stepping back of women from MENA labor markets, it is pressing to study the impact of a natural health crisis, such as COVID-19, on women’s economic empowerment, their labor supply, time-use and jobs’ preferences.

The key objective is providing – both researchers and policy-makers (governments and international agencies) – with well-defined realistic gender responsive economic policy solutions and highlight gender responsive covid-19 economic recovery in the MENA region, particularly in Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt. Both the academic papers and policy briefs that will come out of this research project will aim to advocate for gender sensitive national policies in facing this crisis.

Therefore, the research is organized around three main interlinked areas, adopting a gender analysis approach:

1. The impact of COVID-19 on MENA labor Market Indicators: A Gendered Analysis Using a Projection Technique
2. The impact of COVID-19 on Time-Use and labor supply, and
3. The impact of COVID-19 on the Value of non-monetary job attributes to women in Egypt.

ERF acknowledges the generous financial contribution of the International Development Research Center (IDRC) and The Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD).