Female labour-force participation in Egypt is among the lowest in the world: only 15 percent of women work, compared with 69 percent of men, and the gap has widened overtime. This thesis investigates three layers of barriers to female employment in Egypt, combining two randomized controlled trials with descriptive evidence from low-income households.
Chapter 2 examines whether information barriers, compounded by household dynamics, restrict youth employment. A five-arm RCT covering 11,781 youth in 291 villages in rural Upper Egypt randomly varies whether job information is delivered to the youth alone or in the presence of a father, a mother, or both parents. Information reduces disengagement by 15 percentage points and passive search by 62 percentage points, equally for sons and daughters. Parental presence has no effect on sons but raises daughters' active search by 6 percentage points; the mother's effect persists at four weeks. Mechanism tests indicate that parental presence operates by lowering the social cost of daughters' first contact with employers.
Chapter 3 tests whether structural constraints can be relaxed for mothers in Greater Cairo through a cross-randomized trial of childcare-subsidy vouchers and job-matching services. Take-up was low and neither intervention raised employment; the evidence points to a mismatch between desired and available job attributes, shaped by gender norms, as a binding constraint. Chapter 4 documents how the COVID-19 pandemic magnified these constraints for women with young children. Together, the chapters show that the barriers to female employment in Egypt are layered, interactive, and unlikely to yield to single-margin policies.
