Gender and The Labor Market

Meltem İnce Yenilmez / Ufuk Bingöl (eds.)

Gender and The Labor Market

Key Facts and The Trends in Equal Employment

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book covers deep researches from different perspectives and disciplines upon women in labor markets by successful and expert researchers in their field. In this book, different and rigorous analyses of all areas influenced by gender researches were made in order to be one of the new reliable sources about the women studies in labor markets with various dimensions.

This book consists of six parts. After the introduction, in the first section, there are two chapters about qualitative and theoretical researches related to the concept of women in labor markets and gender theory. In the first chapter, a qualitative evaluation was made between Women and Social Policy in terms of postgraduate dissertation theses by Prof. Verda Özgüler. Her aim in this chapter is to gauge how the topic of women and social policy within the discipline of labor economics and industrial relations is evaluated through an analysis of graduate theses. To this end, graduate theses that were written under the Department of Labor Economics and Industrial Relations and obtained from the thesis archive of the Council of Higher Education (CoHE) of Turkey were examined with document and content analysis. Scrutinized data were shown and interpreted with percentage and frequency tables with fruitful results. In second chapter of first section, Assoc. Prof. Yeliz Yeşil studied a multi-perspective theoretical framework of women in education and employment and revealed and valuable suggestions were developed. According to her study, women’s positions in economic, social, cultural and political life should be strengthened. Education of women is important to be successful in tackling poverty and to achieve country development.

The third section of this book aims to show researches related to parental issues of women in labor markets. In the first chapter of this section, Asst. Prof. Zeynep ELİTAŞ describes the effect of parents’ education on time spent with pre-school children aged between 0 and 5. She utilizes 2014–2015 time-use survey data and diaries of daily activities conducted by Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) for Turkey. These diaries contain the information about time spent in child’s physical care and educational activities. Parental time equations are estimated separately for each parent in the household on their education levels and other control variables. Results of the analysis show that (i) there are differences in time allocation by the education levels of parents and (ii) the effects of education on parental time allocation differ between mothers and fathers. These differences support that policy making should place additional emphasis on the subject. According to literature, low female labor force participation rate and employment rate in Turkey have been linked to many factors by researchers. One noticeable factor appears to be the childcare burden of women with small children. Turkish women are traditionally the primary care providers of their children. The next best alternative childcare option is getting help from relatives, especially from grandmothers. On the other hand, formal (or institutional care) use in Turkey is not high enough compared to many other countries. Thus, the work-family conflict remains a critical issue for many women in Turkey. Asst. Prof. Didem Pekkurnaz aims to investigate the important socioeconomic and demographic factors related to employment status and childcare choices of Turkish women with small children. For this purpose, she used a nationally representative survey data. Estimation results reveal that low-educated women are less likely to be in the labor force and use formal or paid childcare. A high number of small children are also associated with a lower probability of labor force participation, but it has a positive impact on the use of formal care. It is also observed that women working with social security, working at regularly paid jobs and from high-wealth households have higher probabilities of using paid childcare.