Rushed into adulthood: Child marriage and women’s work-family life courses in Egypt

Abstract

Prevalent in the Global South, child marriage powerfully shapes women’s work and family lives. Analyzing data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, we examine how child marriage influences the work-family life courses of Egyptian women between ages 6 and 30, to advance life course research in two crucial aspects. First, using multichannel sequence analysis, we identified six distinct work-family trajectories of Egyptian women who married as children and compared these with women who married as adults. Girl brides’ work-family trajectories are mostly marked by early fertility and minimal labor force participation, particularly in the public sector. While some clusters combine private-sector work with early, frequent childbearing, most remain out of the labor force despite their education. In contrast, women who married as adults exhibit delayed fertility and greater participation in stable public-sector employment, suggesting that the timing of marriage and childbirth shapes sector-specific work opportunities. Second, we use a counterfactual approach to test key mechanisms—education (human capital) and childbirth timing (gender role)—through which child marriage is expected to shape women’s work-family trajectories. While improved education increases girl brides’ public-sector employment, its impact on family trajectories is minimal. Delayed fertility impacts women’s family but not work trajectories. Our findings reflect critically on mainstream theories of, and interventions in, work-family life courses in the event of child marriage. They highlight the need to scrutinize the transition into “accelerated adulthood” as a distinctive feature of young adult life courses in the Global South, particularly among those affected by child marriage.