Thirty Years of Urban Bias: An Estimation of the Rising Disparities in Female Rural and Female Urban Unemployment and Income in Egypt

Abstract

This article highlights the disparities between female urban and rural employment and income in Egypt over the last decades, mainly resulting from urban bias policies. Despite their inferior educational levels, females in rural Egypt manifested higher levels of employment than their counterparts in urban Egypt, a phenomenon that the article attributes to the standard definition of unemployment, which includes unpaid family members as part of the ‘employed’, besides other methodological issues. As such, statistics could misleadingly imply better female rural income compared to female urban income. By means of an innovative attempt to estimate female rural and urban incomes, this article provides some evidence that female rural per capita income accounts for only 0.43 of female urban per capita income, despite rising from 0.2 in 1981. The female rural/urban gap was mitigated when female national incomes rather than female per capita incomes were estimated, with female rural national income accounting for nearly 0.73 of female urban national income.