Blogging the GERPA Conference
Brilliant Beginning
Fully understanding gender issues in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region requires a range of somewhat unconventional perspectives, said Colm O’Muircheartaigh, the dean of the Harris School, to begin the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis (GERPA) conference. In this spirit, the opening panel featured Nobel laureates, leading scholars, and practitioners from a range of disciplines to discuss their work and how it might apply to MENA countries.
Since 2005, GERPA has promoted policy-relevant research on women in the world. Co-sponsored by the World Bank, the Harris School, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the 2010 GERPA conference is being held at the University of Chicago on October 17-19.
Each panelist took time to discuss some aspect or theory related to their expertise and answer questions from the audience. Their comments can be found below.
Farrukh Iqbal
Manager, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management, World Bank MENA region.
“In the Middle East, there is a lot of oil but little data,” Igbal said. He discussed the growing focus on gender research in the World Bank’s efforts to create, gather, and analyze new data in the MENA region—from job voucher studies in Jordan to youth surveys in Morocco, among many other projects.
Roger Myerson
Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
As a Nobel Prize-winning economist who studies comparative electoral systems, Myerson explained the need for local democracy in Pakistan and the obstacles it faces. He said democratic development requires an increased supply of candidates who have proven themselves at the local level in order to make national politics more competitive. Women could play an important role in this development, he said. “There is nothing more important that I could be working on right now.”
Kevin Murphy
George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Chicago Booth School of Business
Winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2005, Murphy touched on the importance of human capital and its long-term, accumulative benefits. But unlike other commodities, he said human capital depends on institutions (public schools, for example) that make investment in the public sector important. “Countries are going to be defined more and more by their human capital,” he said. “Any mistakes we make in the human capital today are going to be with us for a long time.”
Marianne Bertrand
Chris P. Dialynas Professor of Economics, Chicago Booth School of Business
Bertrand is an applied micro-economist who has done work on racial discrimination, CEO pay and incentives, and the effects of regulation on employment, among other topics. She brought up theories that combine psychology and economics when studying women in the workplace. She said research has shown that, in general, women are less competitive and more risk averse than men, and discussed how that might be a factor for the inequality in labor forces around the world.
Gary Becker
University Professor of Econmics and Sociology, University of Chicago
A Nobel laureate, Becker pointed out that more women around the world are graduating with four-year degrees than men. “In terms of education, women are really booming,” he said. But unlike many wealthy nations that have seen this affect their labor participation, women in MENA countries are still sparse in the workforce. He also stressed the important role of the private sector in fostering economic growth, which will in turn provide more opportunities for women.
Women and the Wage Gap
“You can’t understand good policy without knowing what’s going on, and you can’t know what’s going on without good research,” said Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker during introductory remarks at the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis conference on October 18.
In its opening session, three researchers dissected how trade affects gender gaps in Middle Eastern and North Africa economies.
First to speak, Chokri Thabet, an assistant professor from Tunisia, studied the impact of trade liberalization on Syria and Tunsia.
In Syria, where trade barriers make it on of the least open countries in the region, the number of women in the economy is growing, albeit slowly—from 10.4 % in 94 to 11.2 in 2006. Today, women still make 70 percent less than men. Thabet said trade reform could cause wages to rise by 20 to 30 percent, which would raise female labor force particpatiom by two percentage points.
But in Tunisia, which today experiences open trade, liberalization did not succeed in reducing unemployment for either men or women when Thabet looked at pre- and post-trade reform periods, suggesting other factors are at play.
A presentation by Shireen al Azzawy followed by examining Egypt, which has undergone dramatic trade liberalization since the 1990s. Between 1998 and 2006, tariffs have fallen from 18.6 to 12.3 percent.
Yet inequality remains due to discrimination—it has nothing to do with credentials or skill—especially in the manufacturing sector. In fact, as trade liberalization increased, so did the wage gap between skilled men and women. Azzaway says one explination is that that international competition has caused employers to cut back on costs, which as adversely hurt women in the workplace.
On the other hand, many unskilled women found low paying jobs they would have never received without this trade growth, Azzaway said, raising the question: are low paying jobs better than no jobs at all?
The final presentation by Rana Hendy, from the Paris School of Economics, seemed to contradict this point. She studied the gender, qualification levels, geographical location of workers throughout Egypt, finding that unskilled have been negatively affected by trade liberalization, as it some sectors more than others.
Since 2005, GERPA has promoted policy-relevant research on women in the world. Co-sponsored by the World Bank, the Harris School, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the 2010 GERPA conference is being held at the University of Chicago on October 17-19.
Migration and Market Opportunities
In a session focused on migration from MENA countries, Sfax University’s Sami Zouari presented findings that show that migrant women have significantly lower interest in citizenship compared to MENA migrant men.
By analyzing 2002 survey results of Turkish migrants in Germany, Zourari says houshold income, age, marital status, and enrollment in German schools were all positive factors. He proposed policy implications that focus on improving gender empowerment for women and encouraging school attendance as ways to improve migrant interest in citizenship.
He points out the natural rights that come along with citizenship as beneficial to migrants, while the gains host countries might see from reducing the amount of remittances that leave their economics.
Focusing on these remittances, Asama Ebadawy, who works at the Population Council in Cairo, examined their impact on women left behind by migrant husbands.
Egypt is one of the top ten recipients of remittances in the world, yet little is know about the impact on women left behind, Ebadawy said. “Can increasing their decision-making responsibilities speed up female autonomy?” she wondered.
When she spoke with young girls, she found remittances have a positive effect on their access to schooling. But surprisingly, she found that women with migrant husbands are more passive to domestic violence than women whose husbands work in Egypt.
Some attendees questioned her methodology, but she did not get a chance to defend herself due to time restrictions.
Muslim Marketing
In a new Sunsilk shampoo commercial, a woman wearing a headscarf touts the products’ ability to remove excess oil from her covered hair, reduce itching, and allow her to do whatever she wants. She then kicks a soccer ball past a goalie.
It’s just one example of a growing international trend of marketing products directly to Muslim-majority countries. From alcohol-free mouthwash to cell phones that come with applications that remind owners to pray, companies are advertising to MENA markets more than ever before.
And why shouldn’t they? With a population rising above 1.57 billion, the region is expected to be one of the largest emerging market in the world, says Parvin Alizadeh, a professor at London Metropolitan University.
Her presentation at the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis conference proposed a research project that divide the Muslim market into ten separate categories that range from the ultraconservative to super-secular. Alizadeh said she wants to map where these groups are located, and study how targeted messaging influences women’s expenditures.
Health and Gender Resources
The first day of the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis conference ended with a series of papers that teased out topics of health and gender resources in MENA countries. Emory University demographer Kathryn Yount presented findings from a study that looked at an alarming gender gap in the cognitive functioning between older men and women.
By analyzing household survey data in Ismailia, Egypt, Yount discovered that older women have poorer cognitive functioning than their male counterparts. She said a lack of schooling and resource constraints in childhood could account for the disparity.
In Lebanon, older women trailed older men when it came to physical disabilities too, according Abla Sibai, an associate professor in the epidemiology and population health department at American University in Beirut, who spoke second. “Women consistently reported difficulties in daily living more than men,” she said.
Sibai used a 2002 health study that questioned people over the age of 60 about their ability to perform certain everyday tasks and found that women admit to having more physical functioning problems than men. She acknowledged, however, that these numbers may be skewed, as men may be less likely to admit their own physical deterioration.
In the final address, Rania Roushdy, a researcher at the Population Council, proposed a future study that would attempt to uncover how domestic violence shapes the physical and mental health of women, as well as their future activities in the workplace and community. “My hope is that our focus on the potential implications of domestic violence will bring front and center women’s treatment in the home,” she said.
Becoming Breadwinners
Female-headed households in MENA countries are formed for a number of reasons—divorce, death, and migration are just a few. But many share the same financial, social, and psychological hardships, explained Hussein Abu Farash during a morning session at the Gender Econoimc and Policy Analysis conference.
Farash, who works at the National Council for Family Affairs in Jordan, studied the socio-demographic and economic characteristics of home with female breadwinners in his country. In addition to this snapshot, he found that the problems they face range from unemployment to community rejection, malnutrition, and other health concerns. He also said that Jordanian children growing up in female households are more likely to drop out of school.
Salah al Kafri, from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, conducted a similar study of Palestinian households in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as refugees in other MENA countries. In all, he said female-headed homes make up 8.6 percent of this population.
His presentation focused on the social assistance these houses receive from sources like governments, community, and other associations and institutions. He said there is currently no centralized system of cooperation to support these homes. “We found that some people get all the money and others don’t get any,” Karfi said.
Linking Education and Family Planning
In the most presentation-packed session of the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis conference, researchers shared rapid-fire insights and proposals on education and family planning in the MENA region.
Aysit Tansel, a professor at the Middle East Technical University, discussed gender effects of education on economic development in Turkey. His findings showed that a gender gap in education affected productivity negatively between 1975 and 2000. He called on policymakers to concentrate on targeting girls’ educational access through subidies and other incentive programs so that education does not become “concentrate on targeting girls’ ed with subsidies to parents to enroll girls. “a break on economic development” in MENA countries.
Similar to his study at health clinics on fertility rates in Iran, Djavad Salehi Isfanhani is looking at how these health clinics has impacted education. Could, for example, a decline in fertility increase spending per capita on education, improving results for women?
After being suspended after the 1979 revolution, family planning services reemerged in health clinics around Iran in 1989. By looking at the timing of the dip in fertility rates in Iran—it fell sharply from seven births per women in 1979 to 1.9 in 2006—some studies have claimed a direct correlation to the construction of clinics around the country.
Isfanhani is investigating the gender gap in literacy has changed since these clinics have been built.
Negar Ghobadi, a PhD student at Berkeley University, followed with a looked at whether or not gender biases affect fertility rates. “If you want a son, you’re going to keep having children,” she hypothesized. Her data confirmed this, showing that households with first born girls were more likely to have bigger families in Iran, a predominantly patriarchal society.
Finally, David Bishai, a researcher from Johns Hopkins University, looked at the impact of co-resident mother- and father-in-laws on female labor participation and fertility rates. He found a substantial “nanny” effect in both urban and rural areas, he said. In urban areas, that meant women were able to enter the workplace more frequently, as their children were taken care of. In rural areas, it resulted in higher fertility rates.
