Connecting People to Projects : A New Approach to Measuring Women’s Employment in the Middle East and North Africa

Innovations to date in detecting women’s employment have focused primarily on improving individual-level questions. This paper explores an alternative approach, using data on household enterprises and asking who participates in these activities. This research uses the latest waves of the Labor Market Panel Surveys for the Arab Republic of Egypt (2018) and Tunisia (2014). The research questions are (1) How do men’s and women’s employment rates change when adding enterprise-based detection questions to standard individual-level questions (2) Was the additional market employment detected with project-based approaches classified as subsistence work with individual measurement approaches (3) For which women is additional employment detected using project-based approaches The paper presents descriptive results on work based on the different approaches. It also estimates changes in state (being reclassified as working) from adding enterprise-level data. The findings show large increases in employment rates for rural women in both countries when including enterprise-based detection questions.