Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) is important for the country’s economic efficiency through improving women’s relative economic position. Improving women’s involvement in the economy is central for development and growth. The stagnation of the FLFP has negative impact on women’s bargaining power, her empowerment and her benefits from economic growth, which in turn would negatively affect female and children’s health and well being. Egyptian women labor force participation rate is very low hovering between 20% and 25% in the last ten years, compared to a global average of 52%. Despite the agreement on the necessity to provide insight on restrictions and incentives for women to enter the labor force in Egypt, the empirical analyses tackling this matter is relatively limited. Hence, this research is concerned with the determinants of women labor participation in Egypt. Given that the recent literature highlights the consequences of the different forms of market work that women can engage in for women ability to combine market work and child care. We are not only interested in determinants of participating or not, but also in the determinants of the different forms of participation. More precisely, the present research main interest is to identify main determinants of Egyptian female employment status, employed or unemployed. And if employed is it public, formal private or informal sector. In an attempt to identify policy actions required to enhance women‘s participation rate. Hence, we focus on four employment status: employed in public sector, employed in formal private sector, employed in informal private sector and not employed. Accordingly, our dependent variable is a polychotomous variable of four categories. We employ a multilogit model to account for that and use the “Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey” (EL.MPS) 2012 as our main data source. Determinants examined will include women individual socio economic characteristics, geographic regions, economic, income level and community context where the women live. Taking into consideration the social norms and community context is a central contribution of the current study, especially that such factors have been ignored by the empirical literature. Another important contribution is accounting for endogeniety of two major determinants of FLFP; age of marriage and fertility.

As it has been the case in the time of postindependence Iraq, the issue of the Personal Status Code -a law related to private matters that gathers most of the legislation regarding women legal rights-, is at the core of the debates and mobilizations of Iraqi women’s rights activists in postinvasion Iraq. This presentation seeks to explore the realities and issues at stake for Iraqi women's rights activists in the post-Saddam era, focusing particularly on the mobilizations around women legal rights. My research is based on both an anthropological and socio-historical approaches: -The anthropological approach relies on an ethnography of women’s rights and political organizations in Baghdad primarily, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan secondarily, conducted between October 2010 and June 2012 (80 semi-structured interviews and life-stories, participant observation) -The socio-historical approach relies on an in depth socio-historical analysis of the relationship between Gender, Nation, State and Religion in Iraq since 1958. Based on that double approach, I want to focus on three dimensions:  the involvement of UN-Women and international Ngos and its concrete impact on the way in which Iraqi women activists organized and elaborated their advocacy for women's rights  the relationship between the sectarianization of Iraqi institutions and political life and the reconfiguration of women's rights issues and activism since 2003  the rise of social, political and religious conservatisms in relation to the weakness of the Iraqi state, the fragmentation of the Iraqi citizenship and the militarization of its society and public sphere, in the backdrop of dramatic politico-sectarian violence. Through the study of the realities and issues at stake for Iraqi women's rights activists in the post-Saddam era, this presentation seeks to provide a contextualized, complex and multidimensional reading of the relationship between Gender, Islam, and Nation-State in postinvasion Iraq. I am willing to show the importance to historicize, put in complexity and look at the diverse aspects of women social, economic and political realities intersectionally and socio-historically to be able to understand the way in which Iraqi women activists formulate their advocacy for women’s rights since 2003. Moreover, I want to show the importance of adopting a decolonial intersectional feminist reading of postinvasion Iraqi women activism that would break with the postcolonial focus on ‘cultural representations’ and ‘discourses’, and rather direct the look at the concrete material, economic, political and social realities in which gender discourses and practices are deployed in post-2003 Iraq.

This research aims at exploring women’s networks and its effects on women’s empowerment in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, people have gathered in different settings to strengthen their relationships, exchange information, and ask/provide help for those who are in need. In general theories, urbanization is thought to help individualization of a society as a result of collapsed system of extended families. Contrary to the theories, in Saudi Arabia, forms of gatherings seem to get diversified as a result of urbanization. It is said that Saudi women in the past frequently had family/neighbor gatherings at home. Border between family and neighbor is often blurred, since extended families live very close, and their neighbors are, in many cases, identical to extended family members. It was in the 1970s and 1980s when rapid urbanization took place in Saudi Arabia. People moved to the urban areas of Hijaz, Nejd, and Eastern Provinces. Women in urban cities who have achieved higher educational and professional job started new forms of gatherings to deepen their friendships among school friends and colleagues, which is relatively a new phenomenon for working educated women. This study points out the characteristics of sex-segregated gatherings that are commonly held among men and women. While men may gather at houses, tents, isitiraha, as their gathering points, women have mainly used houses for their gatherings. This study focuses on women’s gatherings based on my firsthand research in Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, this study sheds light on the difference between workingwomen and housewives who maintain their family gatherings, through which they strengthen their ties and solidarity by mutually helping each other. This study aims at exploring various kinds of gatherings that women in urban cities host/join, and understand the dynamism of the women’s network in terms of women’s empowerment. This study is also expected to help unpack the images of Saudi women, who are often portrayed as helpless victims of male dominant society.