The Effects of Social Interactions on Female Genital Mutilation: Evidence from Egypt

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a traditional procedure of removing the whole or part of the female genitalia for non-medical reasons—typically as a signal of ‘quality’ in the marriage market. It has been found by the World Health Organization to be harmful to the health of women, and is internationally recognized as illegal. This paper attempts to identify the social effects of FGM and its medicalization—the shift from traditional practitioners to professional health providers—on a household’s decision to opt for FGM using instrumental variables based on spatial location. We find that FGM itself has a strong social effect: households are more likely to opt for FGM the more widely adopted it is adopted among their peers, while medicalization is found to have a significant negative effect in some areas: households are less likely to opt for FGM the more widely is medicalization utilized among their peers.