Women are breadwinners of 3.3M families in Egypt: CAPMAS

CAIRO – 8 March 2018: On the occasion of International Women’s Day (IWD) 2018, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) released a press statement on Wednesday providing interesting statistics on the political and social life of Egyptian women.

Statistics released by CAPMAS reveal that there are 45.9 million women in Egypt, representing nearly half of the population. Moreover, women are breadwinners for over 3.3 million families in Egypt, representing 14% of the total number of families.

Interestingly, 76.5 percent of Egyptian women hold permanent jobs and 36.7 percent are part of professional syndicates. Egyptian women also represent 22.9 percent of the total labor force and 25.8 of government employees, according to 2016/2017 statistics.

A large majority of Egyptian nurses were found to be women, representing 87.5 percent of the nursing profession, according to statistics, while they were found to account for only 6.5 percent of technical jobs.

CAPMAS also revealed that 30.8 and 21.2 percent of Egyptian women and men, respectively, are illiterate, while 23.6 percent of women are unemployed.

In conjunction with International Women’s Day, Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar decided to open police hospitals' doors in several governorates for free for women from all over the country.

In an official statement issued on Monday, March 5, the Interior Ministry said that receiving women for free in the ministry's hospitals will last for three days in a row, running from March 5 to March 7 from 5:00– 8:00 p.m.

International Women’s Day was first celebrated in the U.S. on February 28, 1908, and then later observed in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19, 1911. The United Nations celebrated the Women’s Day in 1975, which was dubbed by the U.N. as International Women’s Year.