性別平權的提倡使得早婚及女性割禮等議題在發展中國家備受關注，過往文獻中不乏討論女性結婚年齡過早造成的影響或是女性割禮的問題，卻鮮少討論結婚年齡對女性割禮結果的影響。有鑑於此，本研究主旨在於探討埃及女性第一次結婚年齡對其自身及其後代割禮結果的影響。
本研究使用資料源自1995年埃及的Demographic Health Survey (DHS) 調查。研究方法為工具變數法，並使用女性初經年齡作為第一次結婚年齡的工具變數。實證結果顯示延遲結婚年齡會降低執行過割禮的女兒比例及延後女兒被割禮的年齡。在分析城市和鄉村地區的不同效果強度後，本研究發現延遲結婚在鄉村地區更可降低女兒會被割執行禮的機率，並只有在鄉村地區有顯著效果。本文進一步將樣本限制於未受過教育的女性，藉此去除教育的中介影響後，延遲結婚年齡的影響力仍然存在。在進一步深究其中的影響機制後，本研究發現延遲結婚會令小孩男女性別比例降低。這代表母親對女兒的在意程度提高，可能是結婚年齡影響女兒割禮結果的潛在機制之一。針對早婚及女性割禮盛行的發展中國家，本研究結果提供給政策制定者一個重要的政策建議。

The advocacy of gender equity raises concerns of early marriage and female genital cutting (FGC) in developing countries. The effect of early female marriage has widely been discussed in the literature. However, the potential effect of marriage timing on attitude towards FGC is yet to be explored. To fill this gap in the literature, this paper investigates the causal effect of women's age at first marriage on their attitudes towards FGC and FGC outcomes of their daughters in Egypt.
We use data from the 1995 Demographic Health Survey (DHS) in Egypt. Using the instrumental variable method with age at first menarche as an instrument for age at first marriage, the results show that delaying age at first marriage reduces the share of circumcised daughters and increase daughters’ circumcised age. We further explore the heterogeneous effect of marriage timing across rural and urban areas. We find that the effect focuses on women who lived in rural area, and delaying the age at first marriage also reduces probability of any daughter having FGC. Next, we eliminate the mediating channel of education by restricting sample to women who had never gone to school. We find that the negative effect on share of circumcised daughters persists. One potential explanation is that mothers married later are prone to care for daughters.

Our findings provide policy makers a better understanding of the benefits of delaying marriage timing. We find that delaying female marriage has a beneficial effect on FGC outcomes of the next generation, and particularly for women who lived in rural area. The findings here are particularly important to developing countries where women are marrying early and female genital cutting is prevalent.

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