Dr. Mesbah Sharaf
As female participation in the labour market has been rising globally, a growing literature has emerged to explore whether maternal employment is a determinant of child health. Maternal employment can affect child health and growth via two potential mechanisms. First, maternal employment can increase a household's income and improve a household's welfare. It allows households to escape poverty and reduces the threat of food insecurity. In addition to the income effect, engaging in economic activity may be a protective factor against mental health issues for unemployed mothers who may be more likely to experience some form of depression staying at home. If depression becomes a factor to cause mothers to withdraw from their children, employment may actually improve the quality of maternal time spent with them. Maternal employment can also decrease fertility, which benefits children by freeing up a family's financial resources and maternal time, which would have been shared across children otherwise. On the other hand, maternal employment shrinks maternal time to care for children. Working women might have less time to breastfeed their children, prepare nutrition-rich food, and take them regularly to health care providers. Maternal employment not only influences the quantity of maternal time, but also the quality. If mothers are engaged in pressurized work with long working hours, they are subject to exhaustion and stress, which in turn affect the quality of maternal time. Furthermore, returning to work shortly after child delivery can also influence a child's cognitive abilities.
Therefore, there is a trade-off between the additional income and maternal time. Consequently, predicting the direction of the relationship between maternal employment and child nutritional status is not obvious, as the net effect of maternal employment will depend on which effect dominates. In his study, Does maternal employment affect child nutrition status? New evidence from Egypt published in Oxford Development Studies, Professor Mesbah Sharaf and co-author Ahmed Rashad used a nationally representative sample of 12,888 children, aged 0-5 years from Egypt to examine the impact of maternal employment on child nutritional indicators, namely: stunting, wasting, and being underweight and overweight. The study adopted various estimation methods to control for observable and unobservable household characteristics in order to identify the causal effect of maternal employment. These different techniques include, propensity score matching (PSM), OLS regression with controlling for a wide range of individual characteristics, and an instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV 2SLS) approach. Results of the PSM and OLS suggest that maternal employment is weakly associated with having a malnourished child. On the other hand, the IV 2SLS suggests a stronger and significant association between maternal employment and poor nutritional status among children.
More family-friendly policies for working moms that facilitate the combination of work-family duties and taking policy measures that support women in the informal economy are likely to improve children's health in Egypt.
Professor Sharaf's study is also available as a Department of Economics working paper: "Does Maternal Employment Affect Child Nutrition Status? New Evidence from Egypt."
Dr. Mesbah Sharaf is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Economics and obtained his PhD. in Economics at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. His research areas are Development Economics, Health Economics and Applied Econometrics.
Therefore, there is a trade-off between the additional income and maternal time. Consequently, predicting the direction of the relationship between maternal employment and child nutritional status is not obvious, as the net effect of maternal employment will depend on which effect dominates. In his study, Does maternal employment affect child nutrition status? New evidence from Egypt published in Oxford Development Studies, Professor Mesbah Sharaf and co-author Ahmed Rashad used a nationally representative sample of 12,888 children, aged 0-5 years from Egypt to examine the impact of maternal employment on child nutritional indicators, namely: stunting, wasting, and being underweight and overweight. The study adopted various estimation methods to control for observable and unobservable household characteristics in order to identify the causal effect of maternal employment. These different techniques include, propensity score matching (PSM), OLS regression with controlling for a wide range of individual characteristics, and an instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV 2SLS) approach. Results of the PSM and OLS suggest that maternal employment is weakly associated with having a malnourished child. On the other hand, the IV 2SLS suggests a stronger and significant association between maternal employment and poor nutritional status among children.
More family-friendly policies for working moms that facilitate the combination of work-family duties and taking policy measures that support women in the informal economy are likely to improve children's health in Egypt.
Professor Sharaf's study is also available as a Department of Economics working paper: "Does Maternal Employment Affect Child Nutrition Status? New Evidence from Egypt."
Dr. Mesbah Sharaf is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Economics and obtained his PhD. in Economics at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. His research areas are Development Economics, Health Economics and Applied Econometrics.