Gender, resources, and intimate partner violence against women in Egypt before and after the Arab Spring

Abstract

This study draws on resource and feminist theories to empirically test the influence of women’s resources and gender performance on psychological and physical intimate partner violence (IPV) in Egypt. Having applied two-stage least squares regressions to nationally representative data from the Demographic and Health Survey (N = 11,319), the results show that women’s education and employment reduce their risk of physical IPV and that the effect of women’s employment on IPV is moderated by their spouses’ employment, with the lowest risk of physical IPV observed among employed women with unemployed or blue-collar spouses. Women’s employment and relative education were not associated with the risk of psychological IPV. While education and employment remain among the strongest deterrents of physical IPV, there was no moderation effect found before or after the Arab Spring for psychological and physical IPV.