What's the Economic Cost of Wolf-Whistling?
Why is Egypt's female employment rate only 16%?
Walk through any university in Cairo or Delhi and you’ll see lecture halls packed with ambitious young women - often outnumbering men. Yet within years of graduation, most withdraw from public life, driven home by honour and harassment.
In societies where men’s status depends on female relatives’ perceived chastity, seclusion is celebrated as virtuous. By contrast, women who venture into public spaces are marked as disreputable - harassment is thus legitimised. If men also run every public institution and turn a blind eye, abuse persists with impunity.
All this has massive externalities: families impose stricter curfews, employers hesitate to hire women for evening shifts, and women themselves abandon opportunities where they may be treated as meat. Only by removing all possible rumours of impropriety can women preserve their reputations.
Drawing on Egyptians’ research and my own interviews, let's explore these negative externalities.
