Women get more callbacks per application in Egypt’s white-collar market — the problem is they’re barely in it

💼 Women applying for white-collar jobs in Egypt are more likely to hear back than men — employer view rates for female applicants are 6.2 percentage points higher than for male applicants, and contact unlock rates — a reliable proxy for interview invitations — are 1.4 percentage points higher per application, according to a new report by BasharSoft, the company behind the recruitment platform Wuzzuf.

The breakdown

What this means: The report draws on data collected across the platform over a full year, covering 5.4 mn job applications from more than 400k active job seekers across 50k+ job postings in 2025. The counterintuitive finding: women’s applications attract more employer attention. Yet women made up 35% of active job seekers while submitting only 29% of total applications — averaging 10.6 applications each, compared to 13.9 for men. Fewer women are entering the job search in the first place, and those who do apply less frequently.

The drop-off is starkest when you look at it by age. Between 17 and 23 — the university years and the period right after graduation — women’s application rates are nearly identical to men’s. After 24, the gap widens: by 25, men submit twice as many applications as women; by 36, three times as many; by 43, five times. This tracks almost exactly with marriage and childrearing age — and it doesn’t recover.

That fits a macro picture that’s worse than the platform data suggests. Women make up roughly 53% of university graduates in Egypt, but their share of the workforce is far smaller — female labor force participation stands at around 18%, against 73% for men, among the lowest rates globally. That figure is trending downward: female participation was approximately 23% in 2010 and has since fallen to around 16.5% in 2024 — a drop of more than six percentage points over 14 years, according to an OECD report — despite women’s continued dominance in university enrollment.

Behind the numbers

Several structural shifts are shaping this reality. The steady decline of public-sector employment in its traditional form — long the most compatible arrangement for marriage and childrearing — has given way to growth in the informal private sector. Unpaid care burdens compound the picture: married women in Egypt spend seven times as many hours on unpaid care work as men.

Childcare support is almost entirely absent — nursery coverage for children up to age four sits below 8%. Against that backdrop, demand for remote work is high: 18% of women on the platform prefer fully remote roles, compared to 8% of men. But only 7% of advertised jobs are fully remote, according to the report.

The pay gap isn’t going anywhere. Alongside a job market structure that offers little flexibility for women, the salary disparity persists: average advertised salaries for female-oriented roles on the platform stand at EGP 13k — against EGP 19k for gender-neutral roles and EGP 18k for male-oriented ones.

There is one notable exception to the salary gap pattern: software and IT, where the gender gap is minimal across all levels and actually reverses at the top — female software managers on the platform expect 11% more than their male counterparts, the only role category in the report where that occurs.

Equal education, unfortunately, does not ensure equal access to higher-paying private sector roles. The case for closing this gap goes beyond improving women's prospects alone — eliminating the employment gap could boost Egypt’s economy by as much as 56%, according to World Bank data.

If employer interest is already tilting toward women, the real improvement won’t come from the demand side — it will come from changing the conditions of work: more flexible and remote roles, expanded childcare capacity, and enforcement of the protections written into the 2025 Labor Law. Those are the real indicators of progress.