Promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment are strategies used to lower fertility. Egypt is also consistently ranked among the worst countries for gender equality - 136 out of 145 counties worldwide in 2015. This and the notion that empowerment builds over time helps portray women’s lives more completely, demonstrates the importance of empowerment early in the life course, and addresses issues of temporality in empowerment fertility research.įertility in Egypt has been rising since 2008 and is at a two-decade high of 3.5 births per woman. Incorporating the influence of life events like first and subsequent births helps account for the possibility that empowerment is dynamic and that life course experiences shape women’s empowerment. Earlier empowerment is also an important predictor of empowerment later in life. There is also a positive relationship with mobility, as women with a first birth have more freedom of movement compared to women with no births. Women who have not had a birth make 30% fewer individual household decisions and 14% fewer joint household decisions in 2012 compared to women with a first birth. ResultsĪ first birth and subsequent births are significantly positively associated with all measures of empowerment except financial autonomy in 2012. Women’s empowerment is operationalized through four measures of agency: individual household decision-making, joint household decision-making, mobility, and financial autonomy. Using longitudinal data from the 20 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey, a nationally representative sample of households in Egypt, for 4660 married women 15 to 49 years old, multilevel negative binomial, ordinary least squares, and logistic regression models estimate women’s empowerment and consider whether a first and subsequent births are associated with empowerment later in life. This study uses two waves of a panel survey from a prominent Middle Eastern country, Egypt, to examine the trajectory of women’s empowerment and the relationship between first and subsequent births and empowerment over time. Research on women’s empowerment and fertility relies on cross-sectional data from South Asia, which limits the understanding of the direction of association between women’s empowerment and fertility in other global contexts. Fertility may cause changes in women’s empowerment, or they may be mutually influencing. In a show in which he opened up for Sondre Lerche, Dan Wilson noted that the song was NOT written for the birth of his child in an attempt not to be one of those annoying songs that an artist wrote for the birth of a "jr," he made sure the meaning was abstracted.Women’s empowerment is often used to explain changes in reproductive behavior, but no consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape women’s empowerment over time. This interpretation has additional support. However, the book So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star (ISBN 0-7679-1470-8) by Semisonic's drummer Jacob Slichter indicates that it is, instead, about being born: the place that is closing is the womb, and the mention of alcohol is a reference to pregnant women not drinking. The place that closes seems to be a pickup bar, noted by the lines: It peaked at #1 on the Modern Rock Tracks and #25 on the UK singles chart. The song was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song in 1999. There no mistaking the message: "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." According to the Closing Time Songfacts, this remains a popular song at bars when they are ready to pack it up. The band's most popular song, it was written by Dan Wilson and produced by Nick Launay. "Closing Time" is a song by Semisonic from their 1998 album Feeling Strangely Fine.