Slowly but surely, a labor market revolution is taking place in Egypt,
Record numbers of Egyptian women are holding jobs, and the variety of careers open to them is rising. Women serve as bank CEOs, newspaper editors, university deans, and government ministers. One has been appointed a judge.
I sense an entrepreneurial potential being put to use:
Ikram Hasem Hadifa, for example, sells fish to help her husband support their seven children. “We’re no longer as we were in the old days, when women just sat at home and had nothing to do,” she says. “Whoever can work can change her life.”
Allowing women participate in economic and political arenas can only move economies and societies forward. How can you expect to grow if you prevent 50% of your country’s population from being part of political and economic arenas and from expressing their creativity and exercising personal liberty? Moreover, just imagine how much can the inflow of women improve competition within a previously closed to them labor market – we all know the benefits of healthy competition: lower prices, greater variety, innovation, and higher quality.
Not being an expert on Egypt, I am not sure who should take credit for this ongoing change. In Russia, on the other hand, notoriously poor enforcement of laws and regulations is creating a problem – women are not given an equal chance to participate in the economic and political arenas. While women are guaranteed equal rights under the Russian constitution, poor enforcement creates a different kind of reality, report argues.
One important issue to keep in mind in this discussion is that statistics can be misleading. Simply focusing on a fact that in some industry, say, one group holds 70% of the jobs and another holds only 30%, without paying attention to the underlying issues, would be wrong. If such a composition is achieved through a market process, distributional or discriminatory policies to artificially change it to a 50/50 rate, for example, would only hurt job prospects in the labor market and reduce the efficiency of firms. Its a different matter if that 70/30 composition is a result of policies which prevent one group from participating fully in the market. In that case, policies should concentrate on removing barriers to participation. In all, there is a fundamental difference between equal opportunity through a market process and redistribution and micromanagement by a social planner.
Published Date: March 31, 2006