Ms. Gameel has the burdens, but not the privileges, of her male counterparts. “I feel like a man,” she said. “Men are the ones who are supposed to struggle and carry the burden of their family. A woman is meant to provide love, affection and be sheltered. She shouldn’t be out and about all the time.”

The oldest of four children, Ms. Gameel, in her fourth year of accounting studies, had to provide when her father, an illiterate construction worker, retired with severe asthma at 51 and her mother grew too overweight to sew clothes in a factory for less than $50 a month.

At first, when she was 19, she worked as a secretary in a small company that sells air-conditioners. She liked the office job, and her salary was twice what she makes selling headscarfs. But her boss was a little too attentive — “he would keep dropping things on purpose so that I would have to bend down and get them.” When Ms. Gameel complained to colleagues, word got to her boss, and he fired her.

Women’s greater presence in the work force has not translated into any fundamental shift in prevailing attitudes toward women in public life.

Indeed, in a recent survey in association with the International Herald Tribune by the Pew Research Center in Washington, Egypt emerged as one country where women in the workplace clearly take a back seat to men and equal rights are a goal rather than reality. Sixty-one percent of respondents in Egypt said women should be allowed to work outside the home. But 75 percent said that when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to work.