Early Marriage and Intergenerational Consequences of Female Genital Cutting: Evidence from Egypt

Abstract

The advocacy of gender equity raises concerns of early marriage and female genital cutting (FGC) in developing countries The effect of early female marriage has widely been discussed in the literature However the potential effect of marriage timing on attitude towards FGC is yet to be explored To fill this gap in the literature this paper investigates the causal effect of women's age at first marriage on their attitudes towards FGC and FGC outcomes of their daughters in Egypt We use data from the 1995 Demographic Health Survey (DHS) in Egypt Using the instrumental variable method with age at first menarche as an instrument for age at first marriage the results show that delaying age at first marriage reduces the share of circumcised daughters and increase daughters’ circumcised age We further explore the heterogeneous effect of marriage timing across rural and urban areas We find that the effect focuses on women who lived in rural area and delaying the age at first marriage also reduces probability of any daughter having FGC Next we eliminate the mediating channel of education by restricting sample to women who had never gone to school We find that the negative effect on share of circumcised daughters persists One potential explanation is that mothers married later are prone to care for daughters Our findings provide policy makers a better understanding of the benefits of delaying marriage timing We find that delaying female marriage has a beneficial effect on FGC outcomes of the next generation and particularly for women who lived in rural area The findings here are particularly important to developing countries where women are marrying early and female genital cutting is prevalent

Date of Award	2018 Aug 29
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chon-Kit Ao (Supervisor)