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Measurement of Women’s Agency in Egypt: A National Validation Study

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Abstract

Despite widespread assumptions about women’s empowerment and agency in the Arab Middle East, psychometric research of these constructs is limited. Using national data from 6214 married women ages 16–49 who took part in the 2006 Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, we applied factor analysis to explore and then to test the factor structure of women’s agency. We then used multiple indicator multiple cause structural equations models to test for differential item functioning (DIF) by women’s age at first marriage, a potential resource for women’s agency. Our results confirm that women’s agency in Egypt is multi-dimensional and comprised of their (1) influence in family decisions, including those reserved for men, (2) freedom of movement in public spaces, and (3) attitudes about gender, specifically violence against wives. These dimensions confirm those explored previously in selected rural areas of Egypt and South Asia. Yet, three items showed significant uniform DIF by women’s categorical age at first marriage, with and without a control for women’s age in years. Models adjusting for DIF and women’s age in years showed that women’s older age at first marriage was positively associated with the factor means for family decision-making and gender-violence attitudes, but not freedom of movement. Our findings reveal the value of our analytical strategy for research on the dimensions and determinants of women’s agency. Our approach offers a promising model to discern “hierarchies of evidence” for social policies and programs to enhance women’s empowerment.

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Notes

  1. Human rights include basic needs and civil rights.

  2. Sixteen years is the minimum legal age of marriage for women in Egypt.

  3. At ages 30–34, <7.0 % of Egyptian women remain never-married (El-Zanaty and Way 2009).

  4. An EFA model estimated with the ‘indifferent” category of gender attitudes items GA_02–GA_12 recoded as missing also resulted in a 3-factor, 24-item model with poor model fit.

  5. We also explored DIF in MIMIC models with age at first marriage as a continuous covariate (available upon request). We retained age at first marriage as a categorical covariate in final models because: (1) the theoretical relevance of the classification and (2) some items displayed DIF in only one of the two possible pairwise comparisons (<16 vs. 16–29; <16 vs. 30–42 years) suggesting nonlinearity.

  6. Engagement in market work captured whether the woman reported either participating in any employment, or performing any of 13 economic activities in the past three months.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by research Grant 1 R03 HD076368-01/02 from the National Institutes of Health (PI Dr. Kathryn Yount).We thank Dr. Ragui Assaad for methodological guidance, Dr. Rania Salem for comments during the drafting of this paper, and Ms. Caroline Krafft for her patient responses to our data queries. The Economic Research Forum granted the researchers access to relevant data, after subjecting data to processing aiming to preserve the confidentiality of individual data. The researchers are solely responsible for the conclusions and inferences drawn upon available data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hubert Department of Global Health and Department of Sociology, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Rd, NE, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Kathryn M. Yount

  2. Hubert Department of Global Health, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Rd, NE, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Kristin E. VanderEnde

  3. Hubert Department of Global Health and Department of Epidemiology, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Rd, NE, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Sylvie Dodell

  4. Division of Educational Studies, Emory University, N. Decatur Building, Suite 258, 1784 N. Decatur Rd., Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Yuk Fai Cheong

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  1. Kathryn M. Yount
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Correspondence to Kathryn M. Yount.

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Yount, K.M., VanderEnde, K.E., Dodell, S. et al. Measurement of Women’s Agency in Egypt: A National Validation Study. Soc Indic Res 128, 1171–1192 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1074-7

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