How does Erdogan's government affect gender discrimination?
How does Erdogan's government affect gender discrimination?
Monday, 13 October 2014: 5:30 PM
In Turkey, similar to many developing countries, women are generally employed as unpaid family workers for home production, child care, and other voluntary jobs in rural areas. However, during the 1980s reductions in governmental subsidies for agriculture areas accelerated internal migration from rural to urban areas because job opportunities declined in rural area. According to the Turkish Statistics Institute's (TSI) data, the population distribution was between 43.9% and 56.1% in urban and rural areas in 1980s. Security problems, such as terrorist activities, has been impacting the urbanization process also in Eastern part of the Turkey. Recent data show that the urban population increased almost 50% in urban areas, increasing to 71.9%. Lately, due to Syria’s (Turkey's South Eastern neighbor) internal conflict has gained momentum due to internal migration. These situations have negatively influenced the female labor force because they do not have sufficient opportunity or incentive to participate in the urban labor market. To reduce these negative effects, the Turkish government (Erdogan's Government since March 2003) implemented a policy in July 2008[1] aiming to increase women labor force participation and decrease gender discrimination in the work place. The policy included an insurance incentive for employers under the condition of hiring women workers (over 18 years old) after 2008. Workers' insurance would be paid by the government's unemployment funding agency for the 5 years at a decreasing rate of 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20%. Therefore, the objective of this study to examine how the policy changes affected gender discrimination in the work place. I will specifically focus on regional and occupational differences to determine the internal migration impacts on discrimination. For these reasons, the 2002 and 2012 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) data[2]are going to be analyzed by using the Difference in Difference Method. Even if the new insurance policy seems to motivate employers to hire women workers, due to the conservative and male-dominated structure of the Erdogan government, I expect to find either negative or no change in gender discrimination pre-policy and post-policy.