The Impact of Female Empowerment on the Fourth Birth
- December 9, 2021
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: IJRISS, Social Science
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue XI, November 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186
The Impact of Female Empowerment on the Fourth Birth
Mostafa Sayed Mostafa Abd – El Hameed El Misery
Department of Statistics, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Egypt
Abstract: The Egyptian strategy aims at reducing the fertility rate from 3.5% children per woman to 2.4 % by 2030. Egypt is one of the most populous countries in the Arab world with a population of 93 million citizens in 2016, and it is set to grow to about 120 million by 2030 if the same fertility level continues (United Nations, 2017). According to the country’s statistics agency CAPMAS (CAPMAS, 2018) Egypt saw the birth of almost 2.6 million babies per year, from 2012 to 2016. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between women’s empowerment and their fertility choices in order to identify how, if possible, can women’s empowerment contribute to lowering their fertility preference in terms of the number of children ever born and thus lowering the total fertility rate. Due to issues with measuring the direct indicators of empowerment as revealed in the paper, special focus is given to women’s education and work due to their role identified in the literature as key resources of empowerment. We estimate a Cox’s hazard regression model to investigate the significant factors that related to having four children. We fit our model using data from the 2012 round of Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey. Results show that reaching replacement level of having two children is a big challenge to which policy makers must pay careful attention? females who less empowered have more children than those who are more empowered also.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the literature of female’s empowerment, the concept of “empowerment” is defined using different and often interchangeable terms. the construct of female’s empowerment encompasses many dimensions, including reproductive, economic, social, cultural, familial, personal, legal, political, and psychological, resulting in a wide variation in perception (Malhotra A, Schuler SR and Boender C, 2012). A large body of research demonstrates that a woman’s strength is associated with reproductive outcomes, including contraceptive use) (Woldemichael G, 2009).Empowerment is a major pathway through which education affects fertility (Jejeebhoy SJ, 1995). Woldemicael (2009) examined empowerment and ideal family size, he used the household decision-making index as a measure of women’s empowerment.
