Cross-nationally, having a working mother during childhood is associated with more
egalitarian attitudes among both adult men and women. However, no previous studies have
explored this relationship in the Middle East and North Africa, where women’s employment
rates have remained persistently low. In this paper, we examine the impact of having a working
mother during childhood on Egyptian young people’s attitudes towards women’s roles in the
public sphere, gender roles in the household, and ideals around number of children and
women’s age at marriage that are related to gender roles. In order to address the potential
endogeneity of mother’s work and attitudes formation, we use an instrumental variable
approach with panel data from the Survey of Young People in Egypt 2009 and 2014 waves.
Mother’s employment is instrumented using the governorate-level female labor force
participation rate and percentage of women working in the public sector in 2009. We find that
having a working mother during childhood led to significantly more egalitarian attitudes
towards women’s roles in the public sphere among both young men and women. However,
there was no effect on young people’s attitudes towards gender roles in the household. Having
a working mother led to lower ideal number of children among sons, but did not have any effect
on views of the ideal age of marriage for women among children of either gender. In the
Egyptian context, having a working mother during childhood thus appears to led to more
egalitarian attitudes around women’s roles outside the household but not necessarily their roles
inside the household. This suggests that attitudes around gender roles in the household may be
more strongly socially conditioned and thus less affected by individual experience, and is also
consistent with the finding from labor market research that women continue to bear the brunt
of housework and childcare in Egypt even when they are employed. Thus, while having an
employed mother does have some liberalizing effect on individual attitudes, broader change in
attitudes around gender roles both inside and outside the home may be needed in order to foster
increased female labor force participation.