Piecing Together the ‘Turkish Puzzle’ on Female Labour Force Participation: Comparative Insights from Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

Southern Europe has seen remarkable turnarounds in female labour force participation (FLFP) over the past four decades. In Turkey, however, scores of women have yet to join the labour force. To address this ‘Turkish puzzle’, we present comparative data on women’s work in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece (SE-4) and Turkey. Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we identify the factors behind rising FLFP in Southern Europe to explore the prospects for a steeper rise of FLFP in Turkey. We reveal two causal pathways to rising FLFP: (i) left party rule, or (ii) combinations of higher levels of take-up of early education and care, higher levels of tertiary education among women and larger size of service sector employment.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour market
• female employment
• gender work inequalities
• education and labour market
• social care
• service sector employment
• Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

Acknowledgment

This article draws, in part, from the research A. Onur Kutlu carried out for his doctoral dissertation project at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. In data analysis, we rely on fsQCA software version 3.0 developed by Ragin and Davey (2016).

2. Rather than conducting two separate QCA for two periods, we analyse each country as two different cases under two periods, which is one of the distinctive features of this study. Such design is also more suitable for this QCA as it provides a higher number of cases as advised in the literature.

3. By determining frequency threshold, the purpose is to eliminate combinations which do not significantly correspond to the cases to basically simplify the output. The logic is similar while executing consistency threshold.

4. We could have alternatively set the consistency threshold through identifying where the natural breaking point (i.e. largest gap) in consistency scores. This method also gives us the identical threshold of 0.75.

5. These are tools of fsQCA software for the simplification of the results through intermediate solution assumptions. These assumptions are formed through using counterfactuals through which the ‘researcher theorises about how an event or phenomenon would have unfolded had a given causal condition been different’ (Legewie 2013, p. 8).

6. While there does not exist any emphasis on the absence of left party strength in explaining low levels of FLFP in Turkey, influential accounts point to the role of the ruling conservative party, cultural factors and patriarchal norms producing an opposite effect (Buğra & Yakut-Cakar 2010; Buğra 2014; Dildar 2015; Atasoy 2017). However, we argue that, as the South European experience shows, cultural factors and patriarchal norms can be shaped by political parties, which could eventually pave the way for rising FLFP. Hence, we see these factors as intermediary variables, which, in fact, reflect the influence of political parties.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) [Project No: 114K121, Mapping the Turkish Welfare State Through Original Data Generation: A Theoretical and Methodological Contribution to Comparative Welfare State Research and Project No: 1649B031201209, 2211-A National Doctoral Fellowship Programme].

Notes on contributors

H. Tolga Bolukbasi

H. Tolga Bolukbasi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University. His research focuses on comparative public policy, comparative political economy, Europeanisation, comparative labour markets and welfare states. Some of his work has appeared in Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, Comparative European Politics, European Political Science, and South European Society and Politics.

A. Onur Kutlu

A. Onur Kutlu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University. He received his B.Sc. in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University in 2011, and M.A. in International Political Economy from King’s College London in 2012. Since 2013, Kutlu has been working in the field of social and economic development through international donor-funded projects.