In the last three decades, Iranian women's educational attainment has continuously increased while their fertility rate has fallen rapidly. Yet in spite of these developments, which in many countries have a positive effect on women's labor force participation, female labor force participation (FLFP) rates have remained at low levels. This paper argues that despite its overall static trend, FLFP of some Iranian women responded to economic pressures induced by macroeconomic instabilities. Looking at the Iranian economic crisis of 1994–5, the study shows that, controlling for individual fixed effects, married women in rural areas and never-married women in urban areas increased their participation rate by as much as 38 percent. No change in hours worked was found for any group of women. The differences in responses and their underlying reasons have policy implications for many developing countries.

The fact that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has the lowest labor force participation rate for women in the world has been extensively studied, but discrimination in pay against working women has received considerably less attention. Using recently available datasets, this study examines the distribution of wages (inequality) across men and women employed in the public versus the private sector in Egypt. The analysis shows that because working women tend to be more educated than working men, the gender wage gap would have been larger if women had the same endowments. Quantile regressions and recentered influence functions show that the gender wage gap is wide at the top of the distribution, primarily in the public sector, which is a sign of a glass ceiling. The gap is also wider at the bottom of the wage distribution in the private sector, a sign of sticky floors. HIGHLIGHTS

In this study, we embark on measuring inequality in Iran. We compute three measures of group-based inequality (Group-weighted Coefficient of Variation, Group-weighted Gini, and Group-weighted Theil) for the following outcomes: education, assets, income, and expenditure per capita. The groups are defined based on gender, ethnicity/language (Persian, Azeri, and other ethnic minorities), and region (urban versus rural and capital city versus other places) using 23 years of annual Household Expenditure and Income Surveys from 1990 through 2012. Inequality between groups based on religion (Muslim, non-Muslim), citizenship (Iranian, non-Iranian) are also studied using the 2006 census. Our analysis of the trend of horizontal inequality reveals substantial reduction in between-group inequalities over the 1990–2012 period. Yet, gender based income inequality remains high. The implications and underlying reasons for these results are discussed.