ABSTRACT
Egypt has the largest and oldest education system in the Middle East and North Africa. In recent decades, Egypt has made tremendous progress towards closing the gender gap in education by increasing access to and enrolment rates in education for girls. Today, women’s share in university enrolments is equal to that of men. Worldwide trends show that increases in female education are strongly correlated with women’s labour market participation; however, this has failed to occur in Egypt, as in the rest of the MENA region, with just 22.8 per cent of women with university degrees engaged in the labour market (CAPMAS, 2018). This chapter aims to shed light on why women continue to purse higher education in a society that has such low labour force participation rates. Through the in-depth interviews conducted with middle-class university graduates, the significance of having a university degree was found to primarily reinforce women’s class status in Egypt. Moreover, “difficult” degrees such as engineering, medicine and pharmacology symbolised prestige. Many women in the sample considered higher education as a supporting factor in marriage, placing them in an advantageous position to attain an equally educated groom and, in some cases, one from a higher-class status. The university graduates of the sample also noted that a university degree assists them in gaining equality with their husbands in marriage and equips them to be better mothers. These aspects were emphasised as carrying more weight than employment, with only some women claiming that they attained their university degree for the purpose of pursuing a career.
