Short Abstract

This paper focuses on the relationship between women’s empowerment and infant – first year of life – and child – between one and four years of life – mortality. This topic is not new but still represents a crucial and timely issue, especially for the developing countries. Here we explore such relationship by applying event-history techniques to data from the Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey (2014). We proxy women’s empowerment level by relying on three components: i) women’s level of education; ii) their decision-making autonomy; ii) and their attitude towards domestic violence. Our analysis reveals at least three key findings. First, women’s empowerment clearly mitigates both the risk infant and child mortality, and the effect is more pronounced for the child mortality. Second, higher education urban areas facilitates the mitigation effects of women’s decision making autonomy and attitudes towards violence on mortality risks. Third, women’s empowerment variables are not losing importance among more recent mothers’ cohorts. In all, the positive relationship between women’s empowerment and child health care represents an indication for politics towards the need of strengthening gender and social equality.