with. These results are consistent with results from other Arab Countries (cf. UN Women 2020, ILO 2020)

# **6. Discussion and Conclusion**

The pandemic has chiefly hurt women’s employment. This evidence is coming predominantly from developed high-income countries (Collins et al. 2021; Hupkau and Petrongolo 2020; Hipp and Buenning 2021; Alon et al. 2021). Equally, the available evidence from low- and middle-income countries suggests that women have tended to exit paid employment in response to the pandemic (Miguel and Mobarak 2021; Viollaz et al. 2022).

In contrast, in Egypt the COVID-19 demand and supply shocks have led to an improvement in the gender employment gap in manufacturing. That is, there had been a small decrease in both male and female employment post COVID, but this decline has been more pronounced for men. This relative weaker direct employment impact on women is primarily due to the very limited number of women in manufacturing to start with. Female participation in industry is generally below 15% throughout the Arab region. Egypt, however, lies even way below this poor regional average. With just 7% of total female participation in industry, Egypt occupies the bottom position compared to its oil importing counterparts such as Tunisia, Joran or even agriculture dominated Morocco. In fact, Egypt’s position is quite comparable to the average for the group of oil exporting countries. Within manufacturing, women participation represents just 18.2% of total employment in the sector. The COVID-19 pandemic has only slightly increased this rate to 18.44%, thereby also very slightly improving the gender gap.

There is a substantial literature showing that female labor force participation is lowest in the Arab region (cf. Assaad 2009; Assaad and Kraft 2015; El-Haddad 2011 and 2016). For years, women were either forced out of the labor market, or have already selected themselves out on account of the difficulties of reconciling private sector employment with care work (Kraft et al. 2022). So, whilst the results reported in this paper show improvements in the gender employment gap, this result is potentially basically driven by the underlying history of poor female-participation in the labor market, especially in manufacturing in the first place. This poor participation is potentially a direct outcome of two factors.

First are factors at home, including stereotyping, social norms and discrimination. Stereotyping extend from social norms of men being the main bread earner in the family (Hoodfar 1997; El-Feki et al. 2017) to types of ‘socially suitable’ jobs for women as such (ElHaddad 2009b; Barsoum and Abdalla 2022), but also for married women or women with children (Ehab 2022). Outright discrimination in offering job opportunities for women is also well documented in the literature (see most recently Osman et al. 2021) with implications on returns to education relative to those to marriage. Equally, gender wage discrimination (ElHaddad 2016) is potentially another factor that explains the overall result of improvements in the gender gap in Egyptian manufacturing. Men are high cost employment compared to women, so it is economically viable to shed male employment in order to cope with the crisis rather than the female low cost factor of production.

Second are external factors. Women are mostly concentrated in the textiles and clothing sectors. The phase-out of the Multi-fibre Agreement (MFA) in 2005 has subjected the sector to fierce competition from countries such as China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia that were earlier quota constrained under the former MFA (El-Haddad 2016). This development has 14