‘Girls Can Work Anything Now’: Generational Change and Schemas of Women’s Work in Cairo

This paper draws on a sample of in-depth interviews with 42 mother-daughter dyads in Cairo, Egypt to examine how individuals make sense of rapid inter-generational change in gender roles. Women’s labor force participation has declined in Egypt over the past twenty years, yet respondents adamantly and eloquently described a variety of reasons for their nearly unanimous belief that women are more likely to work now than a generation ago. Drawing on the social demographic literature that addresses how conflicting cultural schemas frame individual actions, I argue that these two generations’ perceptions of change in women’s labor force participation reflect broader social tensions surrounding the desire for a "modern" globalized Egypt and nostalgia for a past era seen as simpler and plagued by fewer social ills. Schemas surrounding women's work capture the multiple and often contradictory models of women’s social roles that are implicated in these competing desires, as well as women’s attempts to apply these models to the course their own lives have taken.