Egypt, Cairo, October 24,25 2015 Gender Equality in the MENA Region

1. Building a Notion of Equality:
Thoughts on Women, Work and
Welfare
Hania Sholkamy
ERF conference on Gender Equality
Cairo 24-5 October 2015

2. Outline of Presentation
• Articulations of work and welfare
• The female bias in benefits: Paid and unpaid
work
• Social Protection women: using the lens of
poverty
• Framing social pensions as a feminist
intervention

3. Social Citizenship
• Culmination of political transformation that
began in 18th century, notions of legal and
political rights (Marshall 1950)
• Post WWII golden age of full employment
• Exclusive of women as individuals
• Stable democracy demands a level of social
integration that only genuine social citizenship
can inculcate (Esping Andersen 1996)

4. Current Crisis in Social Models
• The welfare state stifles the market and erodes
incentives to work, save, and invest.
• The cataclysmic effects of demographic
changes, dependence structures and aging
• Consequences of the global economy that
mercilessly punishes profligate governments
and uncompetitive economies

5. DISMANTLED SOCIAL
PROTECTION AND SECURITY AT
WORK
Difficult task of harmonizing equality and employment

6. Women and welfare conflicting
biases
• Formal Workers in a
lapsed era in Egypt
Decent periods of Paid
Maternity leave
Flexible hours for breast-
feeding
Onsite day care
Leave of absence with no
erosion to seniority
Social and health security
Access to preferential terms
for credit, purchase of durable
goods, holiday resorts
• Current global situation
(UN Women)
– women spend 2.5 times
that spent by men in unpaid
care and domestic work
(UN Women 2015).
– Pay gaps in the labor
market persist (24%)
– the majority of women
remain engaged in
unprotected informal work
(75%) all over the world.

7. UNPROTECTED WORK
• INFORMAL MARKET WORK inside the
home
• UNPAID FAMILY WORK outside or inside
the home
• CARE WORK
• Are these forms of work problems and or
solutions?

8. Attitudes to care work (el Antary
2015)

9. Social pensions
• False assumptions: economic inactivity, male
bread-winner, patriarchal family arrangements.
• Categorical targeting
• One beneficiary per family (in Practice!)
• Beneficiaries bear the risk of penalty if
‘caught’ working

10. Categories of Social pension
beneficiaries

11. Ain el Sira pilot program: health
burdens of women
• From the 158 female heads of household, 18%
were diagnosed with UTI. Among these
females, 21% were diagnosed with or reported
having previously been diagnosed with
hypertension and 9.5% with diabetes. In fact,
upon conclusion of the diagnostic process in
this short clinical visit, only 9 of the 158
female heads of household appeared to be
healthy and without any reported or concluded
diagnosis.

12. And their children….
• Among the 620 children who underwent the clinical
baseline, 7 children with rickets were identified. Other
commonly diagnosed diseases among the group of 1163
children and adults include bronchitis, asthma,
osteoarthritis or osteoporosis, jaundice and
hepatomegaly, tonsillitis, and varicose veins. Epilepsy,
trauma, congenital mental retardation and various
cancers were also recorded. Psychological disorders (in
children presenting as nocturnal enuresis) are present in
the community and psychological and neurological
follow up was recommended for particular patients.

13. Karama and Takaful
• Two relatively new social transfers
• Benefits given to women/care provider in the
family
• Currently being rolled out in areas of high
poverty
• Over 100,000 families registered
• Takaful is income support for working poor
(new concept and difficult to legitimate)

14. Elided Models of Gender Equality
• Focus on markets and in work equality (albeit
with variable success)
• CCT’s oppress women (Molyneux)
• The specificity of patriarchal privileges in
‘security’
• Necessity of state intervention and recognition

15. Some Evidence from ain el Sira
This program had three key design features that made it
particularly oriented towards women’s needs:
• Designed on the basis of talking to women
• It recognized the social context in which women make
decisions and practice their reproductive and productive
roles
• It recognized the pressures that could compromise
women’s autonomy.
• Encouraged beneficiaries to work and to use social
services

16. CCT pilot qualitative impact on
work

17. CCT reported association with
violence in the home

18. Concluding options
• Economic equality
• Work
• Poverty lens
• Redistribution
• Life cycle approach
• Welfare
• Work lens
• recognition