أثر الهجرة الدولية للذكور على تمكين زوجاتهم: حالة مصر

الملخص EN

Migration plays a positive role in women's empowerment by providing the opportunity for the migrants, wives who were left behind to carry out many roles and take on responsibilities.

however, previous studies were limited to clarifying this positive role in the case of the current emigrant only.

moreover, such studies ignored that women's empowerment must be achieved in the husband's presence.

therefore, the originality of the current study is that it estimates the impact of the husbands, emigration on their wives, empowerment by modeling this impact not only current emigrants but also returnees’ emigrants compared to non-migrants.

consequently, it analyzed and compared the level of empowerment among three groups of wives: wives of the current emigrants, wives of the return emigrants, and those of the non-migrants.

the aim is to answer whether the wife's empowerment gained during her husband's absence by emigration will be sustainable after his return or if it was temporary.

the ordinal logistic regression model was applied to analyze the Egyptian labor market panel survey 2018 (ELMPS 2018) data.

the study measured women's empowerment by the "decision-making index" and the "freedom of mobility index".

the results indicated that the decision-making index provides an estimate of the level of the wife's empowerment greater than that of the freedom of mobility index.

most importantly, the study provides evidence that the impact of the husband's emigration on the wife's empowerment is temporary or fictitious since the level of empowerment significantly decreased among the wives of the return emigrants if compared to the wives of current emigrants.

moreover, it was even lower than the level of empowerment among wives of non-migrants.

marital duration and the wife's education had a significant impact on the empowerment of the wife, both in terms of her decision-making ability and freedom mobility.

on the other hand, the difference in age between spouses and the husband's work status were the variables that had no significance on women's empowerment, whether in terms of decision-making or freedom of mobility indices.