How Women’s Agency Affects Fertility: New Evidence Based on Egyptian Panel Data

Chen-Hao Hsu , University of Bamberg
Carmen Friedrich, Federal Institute for Population Research
Henriette Engelhardt-Woelfler, University of Bamberg

Women’s empowerment has been a crucial topic in the discussion of sustainable population development. However, does women’s empowerment in terms of increasing agency really lead to lower fertility in developing countries? Considering the mixed empirical evidence in the literature, we reexamined this question with stringent causal analyses using nationally representative longitudinal data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (years 2006, 2012, and 2018). We employed cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to address time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and reverse causality—two issues that have haunted earlier studies about the causal relationship between women’s agency and fertility. The preliminary results showed that increasing female agency did not consistently lead to lower fertility in Egypt; we found a mildly negative effect of women’s agency on fertility only in one aspect of agency empowerment—women’s freedom of movement. Although our finding of a generally negative relationship between women’s agency and fertility is in line with the mainstream literature, we argue that future research should more cautiously address this topic because the real causal effect of female agency empowerment on fertility declines, especially at the individual level, might not be as large as claimed by previous studies using cross-sectional data or models.

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 Presented in Session 108. Fertility and Gender Equity