Determinants of Turkish female labour force participation: an analysis with manufacturing firm-level data

ABSTRACT

Compared to other developing countries, Turkey has a very low female labour participation rate. Previous studies usually focus on the labour supply side of female employment. Unlike the previous literature, this paper investigates firm-level determinants of female employment in manufacturing firms using a unique micro data set constructed using different sources. After controlling for geographical variation, firm, and industry-specific factors, our results show that larger firms, exporter firms, firms with higher part-time worker ratio, and foreign-owned firms have higher female employment rate whereas younger firms, firms with higher labour productivity, and firms with long working hours have lower female employment rate.

KEYWORDS:

• Female labour force participation
• labour supply
• firm data
• Turkey

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J21
• J16
• C33

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The rural FLFP is traditionally very high because the whole family works in their own establishment/farm.

² The previous two studies mentioned are based on Enterprise survey data. World Bank enterprise surveys may not be representative, as the sampling methodology stratifies on firm size. Furthermore compared to our study, previous studies have only a limited number of observations.

³ It is usually hard to identify the geographical location of firms with multiple branches, so we only use firms with only one branch for a robustness check.

⁴ Minority foreign-owned firms are firms whose share of the firms total foreign capital share is positive but lower than 50%.