The impact of recessions on gendered employment patterns in Turkey

The dissertation investigates the consequences of gendered employment patterns during economic cycles and recessions in Turkey. The period of examination starts with the completion of financial liberalization in Turkey in 1989, which created a speculative growth-led economic setting and led to three economic crises (1994, 1999, and 2001) and an economic contraction in 1991. The questions we are posing are: (a) how does employers' labor demand behavior respond to the intensifying cost pressure during economic recessions? (b) are women more `disposable' compared to men in crisis times? (c) are they protected due to the fact that they are clustered into a narrow range of jobs , or (d) do they become a preferred type of labor under intensifying cost pressure? In other words, we seek to understand the changes in gendered employment patterns during contractions. In order to empirically investigate these questions, we decompose the change in female employment during economic recessions and we analyze the cyclicality of female employment primarily with time series analysis at the aggregate level, and then with a fixed and random effects method, using panel data at the manufacturing 2-digit subsectoral level. Finally the cyclicality analysis is advanced by making a distinction between upturns and downturns of the cycles to see whether female employment is equally sensitive to booms and busts of the economic and employment cycles.Decomposition analysis allowed us to analyze each crisis separately and showed that relatively favorable labor market atmosphere for women in the 1990s have not been reversed during the contraction periods as well. On the other hand we find that women have been disproportionately affected from the 1991 contraction and the 2001 crisis which had long-term unemployment consequences. The decomposition analysis also revealed the fact that there is a strong connection between changing employment prospects and labor force participation of women during the contraction periods.The findings of the sectoral analysis on cyclicality of female employment indicate that female employment in the urban labor market moves procyclically and female employment is disproportionately sensitive to employment fluctuations compared to male employment in the urban labor market, and in sectors where women have a greater share. A more disaggeragated analysis of the manufacturing sector only shows that women function as the latent reserve in sectors where women are concentrated in large numbers (such as textiles). On the other hand in sectors where women have a marginal representation women can be relatively protected from the employment fluctuations. The final major finding is that women are unevenly affected from economic crises compared to economic booms in the manufacturing sector.