have adopted technology and those that have provided worker training prior to the pandemic. Firms associated with these ‘behavioral traits’ have pushed male employment up while not doing the same for female employment. They hurt women employment twice over. First, through their huge contribution to the gender gap to start with; and second through entrenching the gap further post-COVID.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section is devoted to providing a historical background of Egypt’s development models since the 50s and what that means for the gender employment gap. Section 3 introduces the EIFBS and the stylized facts associated with the data. Section 4 details the methodology. Section 5 presents the results and 6 provides a discussion of these results and concludes.

# **2. Evolution of Egypt’s Economic Model and Implication on the Gender Gap**

The gender gap in Egypt has changed over time in response to changes in policy. The shifts in the adopted economic model have shaped female employment in the country. The stateled inward looking development model from the 50s to the 80s meant that the labour market was characterized by a large public sector including state-owned enterprises (SOEs); a small but growing private sector and a small informal sector. This structure was largely driven by the government public employment drive of the early 60s which constituted a package of policies from government employment guarantee for every secondary and post-secondary graduate, to lifetime job security, to numerous other benefits such as health insurance, pension and maternity leave (Assaad 1997). The implications were that female employment was disproportionately greater in the government sector, i.e. in Egyptian bureaucracy and in SOEs including in manufacturing.

This economic model has become increasingly unsustainable. By the 80s the economy suffered fiscal and external imbalances such as large budget and balance of payment deficits and accumulated foreign debt. As a result the government embarked on the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program (ERSAP) in 1991 which entailed the privatization of SOEs and the removal of various subsidies among other things. Changes in labour market characteristics had already came about starting from the 80s when the government had directly interfered with the market by suspending the public sector employment guarantee scheme for graduates and by introducing direct rationing of enrollment by the Ministry of Education. These two major turns in the economy have resulted in profound changes in female employment in the following years.

Following the ERSAP, state-owned textiles and clothing (TC) enterprises were downsized, thus paving the way for some private sector growth. This growth has caused this sector to increasingly attract female workers. In fact, the entire increase in private sector employment between 1998 and 2006 was on account of the feminization of just two sectors, these are food processing and TC (Assaad and El-Hamidi 2009). Many more women are employed in TC compared to the national average. At the national level in 2007, about 20% of the private sector’s labor force were women, this share doubles to about 40% in TC (El-Haddad 2015). This _relative_ contribution remains true to date as our data confirm. Female participation in the clothing sector remains at 40%, while it had dropped to just 17% in textiles.<sup>1</sup> Female participation in manufacturing remains also more or less put at about 18% of total employment in the sector (EIFBS data). But these persistent patterns mean that the female Egyptian labor market is also clearly highly segmented.

> 1 And to 15% in the food, beverage and tobacco sector.

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