In the recent years, economicperformance in Turkey has been praised due to itssustainedgrowth trends, stability and capacity to weatherthe global financial crisis. However, a number of issuesrelated to the labor market and unemployment trends continueto be the economic and political underbelly to thesepositive trends. The conspicuously low laborforceparticipation among women over the years deservesspecial attention among these problems. The objective ofthis report is to provide an institutional analysis ofpublic policies and programstargeting women’s access tolabor markets and entrepreneurial activities. The reportseeks to provide a comprehensive inventory of publicprograms, targeting women’s employment and entrepreneurshipand evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these programswith respect to their sustainability, institutionalcommitment, and their ability to address barriers to women’slabor force participation. In Turkey, women’s participationin the labor force has historically been low. While 34percentof the women were in the labor force in 1990, therate declined to 26 percent over the courseof the followingdecade and recovered up to 29 percent by 2012. Cross-countrycomparisons show that women in Turkey participate in thelabor force at a much smaller rate compared to countries inall income groups. This is the case even in comparison withthe lower-middle income countries, where women’s laborparticipation rate is 40 percent. A final focus in thisstudy has been on the initiatives that aim to encouragewomen’s entrepreneurship. Given that the percentages ofwomen among entrepreneurs in Turkey are even lower than thatof women in the labor force, if the barriers to women’sentrepreneurial activities are removed, it appears thatthere is substantial room for improvement. This report setsits goal as interrogating in a holistic manner, programs’objectives, contents,and ability to address problemsstanding in the way of women’s labor force participation.The aim of the report is not to conduct an impact analysisof these public programs, but to provide an extensiveinventory of institutions and the specific departments andthe programs that are directly responsible to carry out thepublic policies on the issue of women’s employment andentrepreneurship. Programs evaluated in this report werechosen on the basis of their scope both in terms of theirtargets and funding schemes. Local programs with very narrowscopes were not taken into the inventory. Only the programs,which target to create new employment and entrepreneurshipopportunities for women with a wide sphere of influence,were inc luded. The public programs covered in this reportcan be also assessed based on the sectors ofeconomicactivity in which women’s employment and entrepreneurship ispromoted: Our report shows that the programs carry thedanger of repeating existing gendered divisions of labor andthe ensuing capacity to access the labor market. Forlong-term positive results inchanging existing horizontaland vertical segregations in the market, there should bemore focus on how to change gendered assumptions aboutdivisions of labor within the programs’design.
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