UC Berkeley

The typical life course of a young woman in Egypt today is significantly different from that of her mother when she came of age a generation ago. In this dissertation, I focus on differences between the experiences of the current generation of female youth and those of their mothers with respect to education, employment and marriage. Using quantitative and qualitative data, I examine both empirical trends and how women themselves make sense of these changes. My main argument is that popular understandings of socio-cultural change in the area of gender relations, which may conflict with the statistical indicators that are commonly used to measure women's empowerment, are undervalued by social scientists in the study of social transformation.