 So, my name is Neda Rostum and I'm going to present to you today the impact of COVID-19 on women's labor market outcomes, evidence from the many region. This is a paper that is co-authored with Vladimir Lenzi, Dr. Vladimir from DNSQA and Dr. D'Hemres from the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development in Egypt. And so, let me take you to the objectives of this paper. So, what we wanted to do is that we wanted to look at the impact of COVID-19 on women's labor market outcomes in the many region. And we wanted specifically to look at how school closures affected mothers' decision to supply their labor. And also to look at whether the employers showed specific preference for single or child-free women over child carers during the pandemic. And so, let me first give you some motivation about the topic and also important background information about women's labor force participation in the many region. So, this graph is retrieved from a paper that was recently published by Nellie Maleche Ital and it's published on the IRF website. And I thought that this graph is really amazing because it really gives, like, the history of women's labor force participation in the many region. So, the first thing I want you to look at is the plot in the top right here for women in 1998. And I think the thing that you can notice the first, the most noticeable thing about this plot is that we have this very large orange area. And this area actually reflects the number of, like, the share of women who are out of the labor force. So, for women, for example, with tertiary education almost 40% of them are out of the labor force and if you add to that those who are unemployed, they amount to almost 50% of those women. And so, when you go also down the education ladder, you can see that this share is increasing even more. And so, I also want you to look at the same column down. So, you can see, for example, the progress over time, whether labor force participation for women improved. And obviously, you can see that it's actually worsening. So, more and more women are leaving the labor market or are pushed out of the labor market. And the reason for that actually is related basically to what is happening in the public formal sector, yes. So, the public formal sector started to shrink over time due to structural change in the economy. And so, what happened is that the government wanted to leave the space for the private sector to basically pick up the demand side of the equation or to create more jobs in the market and to retire from the labor market. But what happened is that the private sector was not able to provide those jobs. And you can obviously see this specifically in the graph for men here in 2018, for example. You can see that the dark green area is the share of men working in the private sector, in the private sector, the formal one. And then because the private sector, the formal private sector was not able to grow as much as the public sector was shrinking, the informal sector was filling up the gap. So, the green part here. And all what I'm saying now is just happening for women, not for women. As you can see here from the 2018 graph for women. And it seems that the private sector for like it's, you cannot even see it I think on the graph. The share of women working in the private formal sector, it's really almost not there. And this is related to obviously something like the inability of the private sector to create jobs, but also it's heavily related to culture basically and to women's decision to participate in the labor market. So, let me take you to like the three underlying factors that explain women's decision to work in the manager. So, why women would supply labor in the MENA region? So, first, it's related to economic needs. So, if a woman is married to a man who cannot provide, so usually they're not considered as the main breadwinners in the household. So, if the main breadwinner in the household is not able to provide enough to the family, they would usually go and work. And this mostly happens in lower strata of the society. And also, the second reason is why women don't provide their supply in the labor market is related to values. So, we have a lot of papers talking about the idea that values women who enter the labor market, they are usually looked at as they're not taking very well care of their children or especially if they work long hours, they're not able to provide enough care for the husbands and so on. And also, there were some papers in the literature in the MENA region related to marriageability. So, women anticipate that if they work, the probability that they're getting married is low or they can work, but after they get married, they just leave the job. So, given those two factors that are heavily related to culture, women always look for opportunities that would give them the jobs that you don't work long hours and you have those long maternity leaves like two or three years and so on. And so, these jobs basically were the public jobs that are not offered anymore and the private sector is not able to provide those jobs anymore. So, they just decide not to participate anymore in the labor force. And so, why am I giving you all of this background information? Because what we thought is that it's very interesting to see how the pandemic would change some of the social norms that are preventing women from entering the labor market or that maybe those norms actually become more rooted and so even push more women out of the labor market. So, that's what we wanted to explore, whether the social and the labor market changes that are brought by the pandemic would affect the women's labor force participation and their labor market outcomes. So, what can we find in the empirical evidence? The international literature provides controversial insights about the changes that were brought by the pandemic internationally, so worldwide. So for example, there are those papers that hypothesize and also show through the data that the lockdown is used household relocation of tasks. So, men are taking more responsibilities when it comes to child care and when it comes to household chores and so on. And also, there's like this other opposite side of the literature that shows that mothers had to take longer spells of unpaid leave and unemployment for the provision of child care due to, of course, the closure of the nurseries and the schools and so on. So men like not providing more help and they had to leave their jobs basically for that, to take care of their children and so on. And there's also like this interesting stream of literature that discusses the employer's adoption of more flexible work schedules and telecommuting options. So, the idea is that because of the pandemic, we saw that work can be done at home. There's other methods of work. And so some of the employers started to adopt this and give more flexible schedules for women and this would allow them to balance between work and between their taking care of the children and the household chores and so on. So this might be actually something that encourages more women to enter the labor market if it persists over time, of course. So this is for the international empirical evidence. What do we have in the MENA region? We don't have a lot of papers working on that or even touching, they're just touching upon the topic from different aspects but not exactly working on this topic. So we have this paper by Abdul Faraj. He's working in Jordan and he just mentions the increased violence against women in Jordan so it's not really related to our topic but it shows that there's no more women empowerment due to COVID basically. And we also have, as they're telling us, actually Dr. Vladimir has worked on this paper as well. So in this paper they show the share of jobs that can be performed remotely is low in sectors that employ women. So basically the hypothesis I just told you about that women can work remotely is not an option for many women in the MENA region because they work in sectors that doesn't allow for that. They cannot just take their laptops and work at home. And then also there is this very recent paper. This is this one paper that really works on the same question, our same research question. And it looks at like the how the women increase their household chores in during the pandemic due to the school closures. And their final conclusion was that women with children were not more likely to exit work during the pandemic or during school closure. So this is for the MENA region literature. Now we want to explore, like as I said, our research questions and we do that through a data set that has been released by the ERF. It's the COVID-19 MENA monitor household survey. It's a phone survey that was collected over five waves starting from October 2020. So like seven months after the start of COVID. We have an unbalanced panel of almost 6,000 women surveyed at least once between five waves in four countries, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan. And the point here is that like for Egypt and Jordan, we only have like two waves and for Morocco and Tunisia, we have four waves. So we were not able to have for all the countries, all the data. And also like data availability really depends on which variable we're looking at. So for example, for variables on the evaluation of women in activity, we have all the almost 14,000 observations. When it comes to variables reflecting losses in labor market outcomes, we have almost 2,000 observations only. And as I said, like they started collecting data in October 2020 or they have like the data collected already by October 2020. So for that, this means that we don't have information about COVID before, sorry, about the labor market outcomes before the pandemic. And so actually this data was collected through retrospective questions. So they asked them what did you use to work in February 2020 and so on. We have a battery of labor market outcomes. We have like the normal definition of being unemployed, remaining out of the labor force. We have also some variables on being temporarily laid off, permanently laid off, the reduction in the number of hours, the pay cut, a wage delay and the net monthly wage. So in most of the specification, we have all of these variables just as dummy variables for the three first columns. And of course, for the net monthly wage, we have a continuous variable. So now we come to our empirical strategy. So we have our outcome variables that I just mentioned and then we have also our independent variable here having the number of children for women living in like region J at time T. And we have also this like the beta two, which is like the COVID regime effect. So it reflects the school closure and the beta, we have our outcome of interest, which is the school closure, the interaction with the number of children. So yes, sure. So it shows basically whether women... So what is the impact of school closure on women with children? And we have also like a bunch of control variables like education level, potential work experience and so on. So for school closure, we have... We achieved the data from the Oxford COVID, the 19th government response tracker. I'm just going to move from the slide, but it's just the 30... We take the average of 30 days for each point. For the preliminary results we have, so we didn't get like very significant results in most of our regressions. What we had is for our variable like a coefficient of interest, the number of children times the school closure index. We had this significant result that says that women with children in the time of school closure were more likely to be unemployed than women without children in that same time, that same period. And they were also less likely to be out of the labor force. And this is actually... Might reflect that it seems that women with children in the time of COVID were trying to penetrate again to the labor market or something like that. And so this might reflect that there was this need for women to go in the labor market because of the husband having trouble with providing to the whole family. So this reflects again on the literature that we have been talking about on the hypothesis of needs. So women entered the labor market because of the needs. So because also like if you notice here, it's exactly the opposite sign. Women with children, the bigger the number of children, they're less likely to be unemployed and more likely to be out of the labor force. So they're more likely to be discouraged workers. And our results also we tried this with the... So we also have whether the women had to be suspended, had to be terminated. We didn't find any significant results for that. We only found some significant results for losing more than 25% of the hours worked. And you can see that women also with children during the tight times of the pandemic, they were less likely to lose those two hours. And this might also again reflect that they were more keen to keep on working and to keep on just not losing hours like working even more. And again, might reflect something related to needs. However, our results are not robust throughout different specifications. We tried the multinomial logic for like those different variables. We have also tried alternative specification. So we have added the number of children under six. We have separated those groups, so the children under six and children in school. And as you can see that there is no significant results for most of the most important outcome variables that we are looking at. Okay, I'm done. So just to conclude, it seems that the pandemic might have highlighted that some women in the Middle East might still be considered as secondary income earners. The normal and that the household economic needs may be an important explanatory factor for them to determine entering the labor market again, so their labor market participation. We found that from the demand side, women were not penalized. Like if we go back to the tables, you can see that women were not penalized for having children from the side of the employer. And again, finally, like our results are just not robust. So we may say that our results, like we didn't find a lot of change happening from the peak of a situation. Okay, so that's it. Thank you.